“I grew up in a big Mexican family…” said softball Olympic gold medalist Jessica Mendoza, “[so] the stuff that I think we see a lot now for young girls, didn’t really reach me because I had this huge Mexican bubble around me saying, ‘You’re beautiful. You’re amazing, You’re strong. And be you.’”
Mendoza is currently an analyst for ESPN’s coverage of Major League Baseball and Los Angeles Dodgers coverage on Spectrum SportsNet LA. She was a collegiate four-time First Team All-American as an outfielder and hitter for Stanford from 1999-2002. And she went on to become a member of the United States women’s national softball team from 2004 to 2010, and a two-time Olympic medalist.
In her youth, Mendoza was a gifted multi-sport athlete, but “perhaps more important, her father [Gil Mendoza] was a longtime football and baseball coach… [an] early adopter of filming players as a coach, he began videotaping Jessica’s at-bats…” according to Stanford Magazine. “Then, the summer when Jessica was 11 or 12, Gil hung a 60-pound punching bag on the porch, painted it with a strike zone, and let her loose on it. Jessica, he says, was incessant, practicing even during television commercials.”
She went on to become a prolific power hitter—one of the first college players to pioneer using a longer baseball swing to drive softballs more explosively—and she still holds Stanford records in batting average, hits, stolen bases, runs batted in, and career homeruns. In 2015 Mendoza became the first female commentator for a Major League Baseball game in the history of ESPN, during a game between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Arizona Diamondbacks. She was also the first female commentator in MLB postseason TV history when she called a 2015 American League Wild Card Game.
Mendoza’s father helped her become a great player, but first taught her to be a good teammate. She said: “To be honest my first memories are getting to know players. I remember being on the bus probably like 3, 4, 5 years old, and my dad would always say go sit with the players in the back.”
