Trailblazing Double-A affiliate honors women in the game
When it comes to the number of women coaches, media and front-office staff in baseball, there might not be a better example of the gains that have been made than the Portland Sea Dogs.
The Red Sox affiliate boasts an all-women broadcast booth, had the first female coach to make an on-field appearance in a Double-A game last season and has been hosting Women in Sports nights since 2018.
On Aug. 26, coinciding with Women’s Equality Day, the team conducted its fifth annual Women in Sports Night, bringing in special guests from the area and welcoming back Katie Krall – the team’s former player development coach who now serves as the senior product manager of global baseball strategy at Hawk-Eye Innovations. Krall broke a barrier when she coached first base in a game on April 30, 2022.
“Her being the first female coach on the staff after 30 years is super important to us,” said Allison Casiles, the director of promotions for Portland. “Her being in uniform shows little girls that come to the park that that can be their job someday.”
To commemorate Krall's return to Hadlock Field, the Sea Dogs gave Katie Krall bobbleheads to the first 1,000 fans who entered the stadium. The figure featured Krall sporting the Sea Dogs uniform and a helmet she wore when she coached first.
“It’s one thing to kind of get the figurine bobblehead of her, but then to get to meet her and the fact that she came back to Portland was really special,” Casiles said.
To kick off the festivities, Portland conducted a panel featuring some prominent local names in the field: Krall; Emma Tiedemann, the Sea Dogs' director of broadcasting; Portland broadcaster Rylee Pay; and Sadie Armstrong, a rising high school senior who is committed to play softball at Longwood University in Virginia.
“It was kind of a full-circle moment,” Tiedemann said. “This is the stuff we talked about last season, and we’ve been able to grow in a lot of these positions with more females in our front office and Rylee in the booth with me. It was really special to see the growth from last year and to have a larger event and more people come out as well.”
There were around 100 attendees for the discussion, mostly made up of high school athletes, but representative of all ages.
“There were a lot of insightful and good questions from all sorts of people that were in attendance,” Tiedemann said.
After the panel, the group paraded onto the field. Krall and Armstrong threw out the first pitches, with Armstrong dialing it up to 70 mph with a softball-style windup. To tie the event together, the club highlighted different female front-office members throughout the game, put related facts up on the videoboard, and welcomed 12 local businesses owned by women.
The Sea Dogs beat the Richmond Flying Squirrels, 12-4, just to put the perfect capper on the night for everyone in the ballpark.
“We have 69 baseball games and we try to highlight different areas for our community, and I think it’s just exposure, not just for little girls, but also for boys, too, just to see different people in different positions,” Casiles said.