‘I have a baby’: how women in baseball are redefining work and motherhood
Wendy Hoppel, the Cleveland Guardians’ director of baseball administration, landed home in Ohio to see she had missed several calls from her social worker. She was returning from Major League Baseball’s offseason meetings in New Orleans. It was 2003 and Hoppel had been learning about MLB’s new software system. Meanwhile, her baby had just been born.
“I had already done the nursery and everything, because I’m a planner,” Hoppel says recently. She is organized by nature and by profession – her job involves overseeing things like the immigration process for international players. At the time she was 42, had been divorced for three years, and wanted to be a mom. A friend of hers had gone through the adoption process. “And it just hit me like, you know that that’s what I want to do.”
Adoptions can take a long time, but Hoppel’s didn’t. She was approved in August and the call came in December that she had been matched with a newborn baby.
“The next day, I went to the hospital to see Grace,” she says.
Hoppel said the hardest part of solo parenting is not having anyone to back you up, or maybe it’s balancing everything yourself. “I know I made mistakes,” she says, “but I just did the best that I could.”
And then, of course, there was also the element of embarking on such an all-encompassing journey in her personal life while working in a vastly male-dominated space. It was a decision that would ultimately have ramifications beyond her own family. Often women who are firsts or trailblazers in men’s sports are lauded for their impact on the next generation. Within the Cleveland front office, that’s a reality playing out right now.
It’s a little tricky to tally the number of women in baseball operations jobs across MLB because front office hierarchies are not all exactly analogous. But the 2023 report from Tides (The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports) graded MLB’s gender-diversity for high-ranking front office employees as follows: C at the senior administration level, F at the vice president level, D+ for C-suite level, and F for CEOs/presidents.
“Women remain seriously underrepresented,” the report concludes for the senior admin section, a sentiment that is reflected across all areas.
Hoppel doesn’t remember the parental leave policy the team had at the time. (There is not a standardized policy across MLB. Teams have their own HR departments and determine their own employee benefits.) She was fortunate to be close friends with Mark Shapiro, the then-general manager and now team president for the Toronto Blue Jays.
“I called Mark and I said, ‘I have a baby,’” Hoppel says. He gave her as much flexibility as he could to work from home.
“Had it been someone else?” Hoppel wonders about whether another team or another executive would have been as accommodating. “You know, I don’t know.”
Still, when Grace was two months old, they had to go to spring training. Hoppel loaded up a car with her mother, her daughter, and her dog and drove from Ohio to Florida. There, the wife of a Cleveland coach babysat Grace so Hoppel could work.
All parents need community to make raising kids feasible – supportive families, often some kind of childcare. But Hoppel was doing something a little bigger by figuring out how to find that support as a single mother and by building a life that included both baseball and a baby. She was, perhaps unwittingly, proving it could be done, making a case for flexible workplaces, becoming a source of meaningful representation to other women in the industry.
Two decades after Hoppel adopted her daughter, she was in the Dominican Republic with a couple of coworkers, including Jennifer Wolf, the Guardians’ assistant director of player development for education and life skills. Wolf helps players adjust to life as a professional – and a grownup – and also assists Latin American players transition to life in the States, helping them get things such as a social security number, bank account, phone line and a driver’s license.
Wolf wanted to be a mom, but relationships weren’t working out. She started to think she might be in a place to pursue parenthood on her own. She knew Grace was adopted and, while in the DR, she got a chance to ask Hoppel about the experience of single motherhood.
“That was part of what motivated me more to go ahead with it and not just talk about it. Because I was like, obviously the company has been supportive in these situations before,” Wolf says. “I would not have felt comfortable in every organization doing something like this.”
Wolf worked with a fertility clinic to get pregnant on her own and earlier this year, as Wolf prepared to enter her seventh season with the Guardians, her son Micah was born.
The Guardians changed their parental leave policy two years ago. Now, non-birthing parents get six weeks paid leave and birthing parents get 12. Which means Wolf is still home caring for Micah full time, but she’s beginning to think about what it will look like when she returns to work.
“I think spaces for women have long been an issue,” Wolf says. “And we think of it as a locker room, which is huge – having a place to change and go to the bathroom and shower and whatever. But then, when you’re thinking bigger picture about how you need a place to pump and store [breastmilk], I think we’re not always thinking about that.”
In that respect, Wolf knows she has a better setup than some mothers or would-be mothers working in baseball. She works out of the Guardians’ training complex in Arizona, where she has her own office that she can use to pump. Beyond that, the nature of her job means she’s interacting with players directly – but, if less so than for Hoppel, some portion of her work can be completed from home, or at least away from the field.
“It’s not like an affiliate hitting coach or something like that, where there’s a lot more time at the field,” she says.
There are currently no women coaching at the major league level. Alyssa Nakken, who had been the first with the San Francisco Giants, actually joined the Guardians’ front office this winter. She has a young daughter who was born before her last season coaching with the Giants. There are, however, increasing ranks of women coaching at the minor league level, with dreams of building sustainable careers in the sport. Not all of them will want to have kids someday, but presumably some will. And if baseball isn’t accommodating mothers, then it’s not really accommodating women.
It’s more than just the physical spaces, although those are critical. It’s a question of the culture. The irony, of course, is that plenty of men who work for teams also have kids. But, Wolf says, the dads in baseball don’t quite seem to understand what it’s like to be a mom in baseball.
“No, I think they appreciate their wives and what their wives go through to have kids and raise kids,” she says. “But for some reason, I think when it comes to the co-workers, they don’t quite translate.”
Maybe because, frankly, they’re not forced to consider it all that often. Wolf understood firsthand what Hoppel’s example had meant to her and she hopes her example can help change the expectations around what it means to be a parent who prioritizes both their career and their kid.
“I knew going into this that I was going to be basically the first woman in anyone’s memory to be in player development and have a kid. To be coming to the complex every day and have a baby,” she says. “I was like, I’m going to take my full leave. Because, why would I not, right? But sometimes the men don’t take their whole leave. I remember even when we had two weeks, [there were] guys taking two or three days. I’m like, go home. Like, what are you doing here?”
“I’m glad that I was able to help her,” Hoppel says of Wolf becoming a mother herself. “And, you know, she and my daughter are actually close.”
Grace is 21 years old. She’s in college and also does photography and videography work for MLB. Growing up around the game gave her a comfort in the space that comes across in her portraits of players. Her mother is proud, but even more so she’s happy her daughter is doing something she loves.
“She’s actually on her way to Florida for spring training right now,” Hoppel says.
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