Alanna Rizzo will be a part of MLB’s first all-female broadcast crew on Tuesday

Old friend Alanna Rizzo will be part of an all-female broadcast crew during Tuesday’s game between the Tampa Bay Rays and Baltimore Orioles, the first of its kind in MLB.

Melanie Newman, the Orioles’ play-by-play announcer, will call the game exclusively for YouTube, along with MLB.com’s Sarah Langs as analyst. MLB Network’s Heidi Watney and Lauren Gardner will helm the pregame and postgame shows.

Rizzo will be the on-field reporter for the game, fulfilling the same role she held during Dodgers games for SportsNet LA from 2014-20. She was a guest on MSNBC on Sunday discussing the upcoming broadcast.

“It’s certainly not lost on the five of us how historic of a moment this is,” Rizzo said, “but what we’d really love is for it to just not be about the fact that it’s a female broadcast crew, that it’s five people together putting together a great production and great broadcast for our viewership.

“We’re excited, but we’re ready for it not to be a first.

Langs on Wednesday tweeted, “So, so honored to get to work with this group of amazing and strong women — and cannot WAIT to call this game!!!”

Rizzo last week in an interview with David Waldstein of the New York Times said she was in high school in Colorado in 1993 watching when Gayle Gardner was the first woman in MLB to broadcast a televised game, between the Rockies and Reds.

Twenty-eight long years later, MLB has an all-female broadcast team. From Waldstein:

“Having the first female tag is something that has come up in my career,” Newman said, “and it’s something I recognize as very important. But we also want to make sure that while we are getting all these firsts in there, that we also are not the last.”

Tuesday’s game between the Orioles and Rays is exclusively broadcast on YouTube. The game begins at 4 p.m. PT.

Links

• Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman would not comment on catcher Keibert Ruiz’s status as a trade candidate, but did tell Bill Plunkett of the Orange County Register, among other things, that Ruiz is “doing everything he can to knock the door down. He’s put himself in great position.”
• MLB.com sorted all 30 MLB teams into groups of buyers and sellers at the upcoming trade deadline, which in 2021 falls on Friday, July 30.
• I missed this from two months ago, but Ranjani Chakraborty for Vox’s Missing Chapter series explored the origins of Dodger Stadium and the city of Los Angeles displacing hundreds of families to do so. Eric Nusbaum’s excellent book on the subject, ‘Stealing Home,’ was referenced in the notes of this video: