Melanie Newman Paving Her Path to the Majors

It might be hard to imagine Orioles’ broadcaster Melanie Newman doing anything other than working in baseball, but despite her obsession, it took her a while to find the right road.

In Woodstock, Georgia., being an avid sports fan is part of the culture. For Newman, it has always been baseball in particular.

“It’s the hometown of Nick Markakis,” Newman recalled. “Baseball was just a way of life for us at that point. Everybody played, it was year-round.”

Growing up, Newman enjoyed bonding with her family while attending sporting events around Atlanta. Her grade school used to give away Braves tickets, rewarding students for reading a certain number of books or achieving a certain GPA.

“My parents never said no if we brought them (tickets) home for free,” she said.

Despite the common misconception, Newman did not play softball as a kid. “I did not pick up a bat and take a swing until 2019 in Myrtle Beach,” she explained. Newman had been working in the minor leagues for five years already at that point. She continued, “I was able to take hacks one night. It was great.”

Despite being among the most knowledgeable sports fans, Newman did not enjoy competing in athletics as a child. “Everybody looked forward to field day, but that was the day where I was like ‘fake sick, just fake sick, you don’t have to show up,’” she laughed. “I hated it.”

Newman enjoyed riding horses at her childhood barn, reading books, and participating in pageants. She was also a majorette and dabbled in dance, cheerleading, and gymnastics. Competitive sports was more natural to her younger sister, Stephanie, who ran track and field, cross country, and played powder puff football.

“We’re polar opposites,” Newman laughed. Stephanie is five years younger and is naturally a platinum blonde compared to Melanie’s dark brown hair. In the classroom, Stephanie was a biomedical engineering major, while Melanie studied broadcast journalism. And as Melanie now works full-time traveling the country, her sister enjoys life as a stay-at-home mom with her husband and two children.

One area the two share, is their taste in colleges, as both attended Troy University. Two weeks before graduation, Melanie obliged and showed her younger sister around the campus. To her shock, Stephanie committed.

Troy University served as the turning point for Melanie’s career path. As a kid, she originally wanted to be a veterinarian, but after dissecting a dogfish shark in the fifth grade, that dream was tossed very quickly out the window.

Newman gravitated towards early elementary education after that, following in the footsteps of her mother. Though that didn’t mean she had her support. Newman explained, “She told me, ‘If your scholarship doesn’t cover something, we’re not going to cover it. It’s a 30-year commitment, the second-lowest paid profession in the nation, and the benefits are disintegrating.’” Instead of taking her mother’s advice to heart for a more stable career path, Newman explored journalism. “I had no benefits, no pay, no stability, and no guarantee of anything,” she said jokingly.

She began college wanting to do print journalism. She always had a strong background of reading and writing, which dated back to covering sporting events and serving as a section editor for her yearbook in high school.

“It was a natural route for me. It wasn’t a hard compromise.”

The journalism program at Troy University is so large, it is split into two separate programs between print journalism and broadcasting. It was her advisor, David Kirby, who steered Newman towards broadcasting. He paved her path, without even knowing it.

Newman regrets never going back to ask Kirby why he thought she’d be a better fit in broadcasting, compared to her passion of print journalism, but she followed his advice regardless. “That was when they thought print was just going to die, before it rediscovered itself digitally… They were trying to steer students into something that can actually be a profitable, obtainable career, and not a sinking ship that might not exist when you graduated,” said Newman.

At the end of the day, it was always going to be sports, regardless of if it was in print or broadcasting.

Newman gushed, “With sports, you had unifying moments. I liked being a part of a solution and being part of a unifier.”

While at Troy, Newman handled play-by-play duties and color commentary across a multitude of Division I sports, while also assisting their Sports Information department. Shortly before graduating, she met Atlanta Hawks’ play-by-play announcer Bob Rathbun, a moment she credits as setting her future in motion.

“He was like the genesis of it all,” Newman began. There was no particular person influencing her career aspirations at the time – in part, due to the lack of women in the broadcasting field of the sports industry. “He was like, ‘Look, you can do the multi-sport thing and that makes you more marketable, but it’s very clear that baseball is your sport and if I were you, that’s what I would stick to,’” continued Newman.

So, she did just that.

Newman received her first paying job in professional baseball with the Double-A Mobile BayBears during the 2014 season. It eventually led to her “big break” with the Class-A Advanced Salem Red Sox in 2019. Unbeknownst to Newman at the time, Salem would be her last minor league stop before her real big break.

“(Salem) was the first time I felt like I had a home,” she recalled, emphasizing the organization’s culture. When thinking back to the interview process, it was the first time Newman had not been asked about her gender affecting the position. “It was always the same. ‘Well, as a girl how would you handle this? And as a girl, how would you handle that?’ Salem never asked any of that… They were asking more about my experiences,” she continued.

After that 2019 season, Newman had really settled on the idea of making Salem home. Then the Orioles called.

She didn’t realize it was even a job interview.

“I flew up and had lunch and just talked about the philosophy of where baseball is going, how fans are connecting with it, how engagement is changing, and the way broadcasting style needs to adapt to that,” she recalled.

Newman left the meeting under the impression that she could be an emergency back-up in case someone couldn’t make a game, since Salem was not too far from Baltimore. “I was very wrong,” she laughed.

Soon after, she was offered a full-time role as one of the club’s official broadcasters with the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network and the Orioles Radio Network. It was too big of an opportunity to turn down; Newman could count on one hand how many females held play-by-play duties in the Majors. The Orioles were also offering one of the most versatile positions.

“Everybody always told me, ‘You have to pick one. You can’t do play-by-play and sidelines.’ And then Baltimore was like, ‘Here’s both,’” she explained excitedly.

With that, Newman became MASN’s pregame, postgame, and sideline host for television, and the Orioles’ play-by-play announcer for radio beginning in 2020, switching up her role depending on the series.

With the job came more responsibility than she initially realized as one of the leading female representatives in baseball, but she wouldn’t have it any other way. “The place where you start to make that difference, is just literally showing up and doing a quality job,” she said.

“When you put somebody in that position, male or female, it doesn’t matter, that’s when you become a role model,” Newman continued.

Doing a quality job is what lead to even more opportunities during the 2021 baseball season.

Newman was asked to perform play-by-play duties for a nationally broadcasted Major League Baseball game on June 22 when the Texas Rangers took on the Oakland Athletics at Globe Life Field in Arlington, Texas for the YouTube Game of the Week. She was the second female ever to hold such a role, joining Suzyn Waldman who did so nearly 20 years prior.

“It was a huge honor to follow Suzyn,” Newman said.

Waldman also happens to be Newman’s mentor in the industry. “She tells it like it is, she doesn’t take any grief from anybody… If you didn’t do well at something, she’ll tell you that, and you need that in order to get better,” she continued.

The following month, Newman did play-by-play for the July 20 YouTube Game of the Week when the Baltimore Orioles faced the Tampa Bay Rays at Tropicana Field, marking the first-ever all-women broadcast crew on national television. Then, on September 29, Newman called ESPN’s first all-female baseball broadcast when the San Diego Padres visited the Los Angeles Dodgers.

While she has loved every opportunity thrown her way, at the end of the day, as someone who grew from the minor leagues, Newman loves the day-to-day grind of working with one team, something that you don’t necessarily get when you’re broadcasting on the national stage.

“It was a bit of an adjustment. I had really good people around me that were helping guide me through it, but it was nerve-racking… It would’ve been easy to say no because we don’t get many off days, but I’m new in my career still and these are opportunities that if you keep saying no, they’re not going to keep coming back to you.”

Newman has faced her share of challenges in her first two big league seasons, though, in large part to the COVID-19 pandemic closing off access to the players that is usually key to a broadcaster’s success.

The pandemic also limited travel for broadcasters during the 2020 and 2021 baseball seasons, something Newman thoroughly enjoys. She’d love to see the California ballparks when she is able, but her ultimate bucket-list item is calling a game at Fenway Park and signing the inside of the Green Monster prior to an Orioles vs. Red Sox game, which she refers to as a classic matchup.

“My family is from Boston, so Fenway is a special place for us. That’s home, and it’s always going to have something special,” Newman said.

Although Newman did not always know where she wanted her career to take her, she is very proud of the person she has become. If she could give her younger self any piece of advice, it’d be that “knowing it gets better and bullies don’t get a chance to win in the end, and just keep taking the high road and keep turning the other cheek. They get theirs and you get yours, and yours is a lot more enjoyable when you’re a nice person,” she exclaimed.

Baseball was the perfect route for Newman, and she’s thrilled to see where the opportunities continue to take her.

“I’ve really enjoyed where I’ve been at right now… For whatever reason baseball was just the one. I wanted to know every little detail about it. I was obsessed. Obsessed,” she gushed.