Before Sandra Hunt, Nancy Lay, Dee Kantner and Violet Palmer, there was Pam Postema.
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Unlike her basketball and soccer counterparts, Postema, a baseball umpire, never reached the pinnacle of her profession, reaching the Class AAA level and working spring-training games but never landing a regular-season assignment.
Postema is thrilled that women are starting to clear the gender barrier and that she might have had a hand in it. “I think it’s great,” she said from her Mansfield, Ohio, home. “I think I might have helped. Finally, different sports are coming around. I think baseball will be the last. The very last.”
Postema was a minor-league umpire from 1977 to 1989, spending seven of those years in the Class AAA Pacific Coast League. Despite regular work in spring training, she was never promoted to the majors. Baseball executives claimed she wasn’t qualified; Postema claimed it was because she was a woman.
She finally sued Major League Baseball, accepting a settlement in 1997. Now she works in a Honda auto plant in Mansfield. “I miss umpiring,” she said. “I don’t think about it much anymore. I’ve been out of the game for nine years. I’ve moved on.”
She isn’t surprised that four women are officiating in major pro leagues. She compares it to breaking the color line in sports. “Before, people would say, `Look, it’s a black,’ ” she said. “Now, nobody cares as long as they’re doing the job.”
While the sports world watches every at-bat of Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa and follows the Yankees’ challenge of the single-season record for victories, Postema doesn’t have much interest in baseball anymore. “I rarely watch a game, except for the World Series,” she said. “I don’t care much about it. They didn’t care much about me.”