In early October, Ronnie Gajownik got an unexpected call.
Josh Barfield’s name popped up on her phone while she was cleaning her apartment. She was nervous to pick up the phone as most people do when their boss calls them.
“Hey Ronnie, how’s it going?” Barfield, the Director of Player Development for the Arizona Diamondbacks farm system, asked her.
“Yeah, you know, just cleaning my blinds, no big deal,” she answered nervously.
“We want to go ahead and talk to you about next season. We’d really like for you to be up in Hillsboro [Oregon]. Oh, wait, hold on a second. I’m getting another call,” he tells her.
Barfield hangs up and she stares at her phone for 30 seconds before it rings again. During that short time, which felt like forever, her mind pondered what her new role could be.
He gets back on the line and tells her “we want you to be the manager in Hillsboro.”
Gajownik will be the Arizona Diamondbacks’ High-A affiliate Hillsboro Hops manager making her the first female manager to coach at this level.
Minor league baseball is a driving force behind the majors, so any change that happens at the lower levels of baseball, will be duplicated at the highest level shortly after. Whether it’s in coaching, writing or data analytics, more women are starting to get involved in a sport they grew up watching. Gajownik and all of the other women who are working in sports are showing younger generations that they have a seat at the table.
“It’s really empowering,” Kyrstin Ginter, a UO student and the Game Director for the Eugene Emeralds, a local minor league team for the San Francisco Giants, said. “I hope that this can be a sign of change and a positive step for women who work in baseball.”
At the start of the 2022 season, there were 33 women who had some type of coaching role across the major and minor league levels, which is the most in professional baseball history. According to a report done by the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida, Major League Baseball received a C+ in their gender hiring, which is the highest they’ve received since UCF started releasing its report cards.
Over the past few years, different women across baseball have been making headlines. Between Kim Ng, the first female general manager in baseball, Genevieve Beacom, who made her Australian Baseball League debut at the age of 17, Alyssa Nakken, MLB’s first female coach, and the many other women who have broken down barriers, baseball is becoming a sport for everybody.
With the hiring of Gajownik, more women are starting to see themselves at the table.
“It feels great to get this opportunity, especially with the Diamondbacks,” Gajownik said. “They saw my potential in me as a coach and as a person. Hopefully, everybody who’s been involved with me and also all of the little girls and women who are seeing this know that if you’re qualified, you can do it and that’s all you need to be.”
After she got the news over the phone, she threw her body onto her couch and started to reflect.
“It feels a little surreal to be honest with you,” Gajownik said. “I was definitely shocked. Once I started assessing it, I was like ‘yes, this makes sense’.”
When she was younger growing up in Orlando, Florida, her dad would pull her out of school and take her to a Spring Training game. It didn’t matter what team it was, they just wanted to spend time together watching baseball. It was something that they bonded over, but when she looked out onto the field, there wasn’t anyone that looked like her.
“I know that if my dad took me out of school on a Wednesday, and we went to a baseball game, and I saw a female coach on the field. I know Thursday my life would have been changing in the trajectory of where I wanted to go,” Gajownik said. “The visibility aspect of it is huge, because again, it’s showing little girls and women that we’re breaking glass ceilings, and we’re leaving the breadcrumbs for everybody behind us for us just to keep adding on to it to see how far we can go.”
Before making her decision to focus on coaching, she bounced back and forth between baseball and softball. She was an infielder at the University of South Florida, and after she graduated, she won a gold medal with the USA Women’s baseball team during the 2015 Pan American games in Canada.
From there, she went to Liberty University and worked as a graduate assistant coach with the softball team. She moved into full-time coaching at the University of Massachusetts Amherst for three years before transferring into professional baseball.
In early 2021, the Arizona Diamondbacks hired Gajownik as a video assistant for the Hops, but after the Amarillo Sod Poodles’ — the Diamondbacks’ Double-A affiliate — head coach Javier Colina was injured, they promoted her to be their first base coach.
“She went out there and it took her about two seconds to fit right into the group,” Barfield said. “She did a great job working with the guys in Amarillo. She’s just got such an ease about her, the way she connects with people. I think some of the best coaches — obviously they have good content and she has that. But I also think they’re incredible connectors and she’s definitely one of those. She shows leadership; she shows initiative.”
When it came time to put together the various coaching staffs for the 2023 season, Barfield called her an easy choice.
Being a coach at any level is a tough job, but at the professional level, it’s a different story. Even though she’s the first female manager at the High-A level, she’s the second female manager in professional baseball. Rachel Balkovec, who became the first woman last season, coaches the New York Yankees’ Low-A team, the Tampa Tarpons. When the news broke about Gajownik, she immediately called her.
They talked about the excitement of the position, the struggles of being a woman in sports and just being a manager in general, and tips for the upcoming season.
It wasn’t the whirlwind of emotions that she felt while chatting with Barfield in early last October, rather, a harbinger for conversations to come as Gajownik will soon field calls from other women who will have similar roles.
