During the National League Championship Series, I wanted to eat dinner with a friend in the industry. This is what happens in the postseason, it functions as a sort of protracted, caravanning reunion for baseball writers who don’t live in the same city. You see them in airports and hotel lobbies and press boxes and hopefully you get a few minutes to eat together at the ballpark between field access and first pitch.
“I just have to pump,” I said to my friend, a man with children of his own, “and then we can eat.”
He was sitting with another man, a younger one. The young one guffawed. He, the young one, said something like crazy how you just come out and say that!
The reaction confused more than annoyed me. I hadn’t even really considered being circumspect about mentioning pumping. I didn’t feel embarrassed, but I did feel conspicuously uncool1. I had admitted that being a woman baseball writer, in this particular moment, was not exactly the same thing as being a man baseball writer. And, indeed, that I wanted something more or — at least different — than to be one of the guys.
“Yup,” I said. And went to pump.
The Mets stadium has a pumping pod available to all mothers on the suite level below the press box. It is shared by fans, but easy to access. You don’t have to go outside, braving elements and throngs, and it’s a conveniently quick trip from the media-only areas. The inside of the pod is workable. Comfortable enough, includes a TV to keep track of the game.
Of course, pumping at the ballpark is still a total pain in the ass, but parenting in general is like turning up the difficulty on your life a hundred fold overnight so then the more incremental annoyances don’t seem so debilitating.
Then the Mets were eliminated and the Dodgers faced the Yankees in the World Series.
I emailed the Yankees PR staff ahead of time to ask about somewhere to pump. Granted, it was the morning of Game 3, so when they didn’t reply, I packed up my pump stuff and took the train 70 minutes north to the Bronx. There, I raised the issue with an MLB PR person. They spoke with someone on the Yankees and a very polite, junior-seeming member of the comms team took over. First, he showed me a family restroom on the concourse. It was concrete and cold. In a few hours, when the game started, it would be where some portion of the nearly 50,000 fans peed. I told them that would not work. Ok, they said, when I needed to pump, let them know and someone would take me to better spot.
That turned out to be the designated mother’s room for fans — which was so far from the press box in the upper decks of the outfield concourse that they enlisted a security guard to ensure I could find it and fight through the crowds. It was freezing, literally, and so remote I felt like we were closer to the parking lot than the field, because we definitely were. If I was a fan who needed to pump or breastfeed and that was my only option, I would not return to a Yankees game until my baby was weaned. It also took forever — over an hour all told — which is simply not feasible to factor into a stressful workday several times over.
I pumped, returned to the press box, packed up my stuff and left. I had to get home before the next time I needed to pump.
The next day I reached out to someone who worked in HR for MLB and asked if she could facilitate finding somewhere more convenient to the media work areas that did not require a handler to access. She said she would do that, and then a few hours later she emailed back to say that the Yankees were “unable to provide a different private space for you.” Fortunately, I was home when I received that email because I was not polite in my visceral reaction.
Parenthood is (SHOULD BE!!!!) a choice. A choice to complicate your life. Make it more tiring, more expensive. Messier and and more difficult in every way and every day. (See: aforementioned overnight leveling up.) But moms are not, actually, superheroes and that should never have been the standard. Feeding your baby shouldn’t be a test of how much shit you’re willing to put up with or far you’re willing to push past your breaking point. There’s no extra glory in sacrificing some part of your parentself just to do a bad job at your job. Not in a competitive industry where staying afloat feels like a zero-sum game. Or if there is, I don’t want it.
Here’s how that situation was ultimately resolved: After slamming my fists on the floor (regrettable) and insisting this was all impossible, I went to the ballpark. There, I raised my concern with another MLB official. He fixed it easily and quickly. A small office off the press conference room was available. It had always been available. It just wasn’t an option until I’d annoyed enough people, made my neediness unavoidable and my mother-ness obtrusive2.
It worked perfectly for my purposes, which were to pump three times during the final game of the 2024 MLB season and panic when it stretched close to four hours and threatened extras. I watched the Dodgers celebrate blearily and, a few hours later, gave my son a bottle. It was exhausting and fine.
About a month after the season ended, someone from the Yankees called me to apologize. The original email asking for pumping accommodation had gone to a spam folder. I don’t think they had any reason to lie about that. I just don’t know how all the other communication about the issue ended up in the spam folder as well. Even the in-person stuff. It doesn’t matter for me. By the time I return to Yankee Stadium, I’ll be pumping much less if at all. But if I’m the last person it applies to, that’s a problem as well, no?
All of this made me think of something else, from a while ago, before I was even pregnant. I was sitting on a low couch under unnaturally bright lighting with several cameras trained on me and someone asked if I had been afraid to work in a male-dominated industry. It was so well meaning. I had agreed, against the squeamishness I feel about such things, to talk about being A Woman In Sports and I don’t remember anything else the producers asked, or what I answered, or even what I wore for such an occasion even though I’m sure I stressed about it ahead of time. But that question hit me like an epiphany.
They think sexism is something women feel, I realized, not something that happens to women regardless of how we feel.
I’m being reductionist, I’m sure, or painting with too broad a brush. But then I started to realize a lot of the well-intentioned but naggingly irksome way men talk about sexism fit into this framing: sexism as something women feel — afraid, intimated, objectified, passed over, left out, harassed even — and not an actual inequity. Sexism as something you experience — valid, but ultimately amorphous — not something you encounter, like a wall or the temporal limits of pumping very far from the press box while covering a baseball game. Not something that is happening all the time whether consciously or, more often, unconsciously. Not something that is structural, systemic, that requires substantive effort to thwart and not simply an absence of malice.
In that version, the pain is real but the impact is all in our head, only as limiting as we let it be.
I didn’t get dinner with my friend that night in the NLCS. By the time I was done pumping, it was so close to first pitch. These things happen. That’s not why I’m still unemployed3. The younger guy, by the way, has my old job now at Yahoo Sports. It’s not his fault, but it makes for a hell of a kicker.
That is actually a pretty fair description for how it feels to be publicly a mother in general: not embarrassed about how conspicuously uncool you are.
And now here I am, writing about it. Making a big fuss and probably pissing some people off about not getting sufficient ‘special treatment.’ There’s no way to be chill in parenthood.
Thank you for sharing this aaaaaand f these intolerant men. Almost 7 years later, I can still feel my rage about this seething beneath the surface. Sincerely, a person who pumped in the press box at Notre Dame Stadium
Puritan America…god this stuff sucks so much. I’m from MN (go Twins, if they’d only try), but I’ve lived in Europe for 15+ years. Literally every mom in the country I live in breastfeeds. We have two kids (10 & 13 now) and they were breastfed.
At the cafe. Breastfeed. At the park. Boom, breastfeed. On the metro? Kid’s hungry, LFG. Absolutely no one thinks this is weird even a little bit. Baseball is still, for the dudes, a dudes thing I guess…which is also interesting and dumb because some of the best coverage of the sport comes from non-male journos/writers. Really sorry about shit like this.