Endy Hoppel, the Cleveland Guardians’ director of baseball administration, landed home in Ohio to see she had missed several calls from her social worker. She was returning from the offseason meetings of Major League Baseball in New Orleans. Hoppel had been learning about MLB’s new software system back in 2003. Her child had just been born in the interim. Hoppel recently asserts, “I had already done the nursery and everything, because I’m a planner.” She is organized by nature and profession because her job involves overseeing international players’ immigration procedures. At the time she was 42, had been divorced for three years, and wanted to be a mom. She knew someone who had gone through the adoption process. “And it just hit me like, you know that that’s what I want to do.”
Adoptions can take a long time, but Hoppel’s didn’t. She was approved in August and the call came in December that she had been matched with a newborn baby.
She says, “The next day, I went to the hospital to see Grace.” Hoppel said the hardest part of solo parenting is not having anyone to back you up, or maybe it’s balancing everything yourself. “I know I made mistakes,” she says, “but I just did the best that I could.”
And then, of course, there was also the element of embarking on such an all-encompassing journey in her personal life while working in a vastly male-dominated space. It was a choice that would ultimately affect more people than just her family. Women who are pioneers or firsts in men’s sports are frequently praised for their influence on future generations. Within the Cleveland front office, that’s a reality playing out right now.
Because no two front office hierarchies are the same, it can be difficult to count the number of women working in baseball operations across the MLB. But the 2023 report from Tides (The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports) graded MLB’s gender-diversity for high-ranking front office employees as follows: C at the senior administration level, F at the vice president level, D+ for C-suite level, and F for CEOs/presidents.
“Women remain seriously underrepresented,” the report concludes for the senior admin section, a sentiment that is reflected across all areas.
Hoppel doesn’t remember the parental leave policy the team had at the time. (There is not a standardized policy across MLB. Teams have their own HR departments and determine their employee benefits.) She was fortunate to be close friends with Mark Shapiro, the then-general manager and now team president for the Toronto Blue Jays.
According to Hoppel, “I called Mark and I said, ‘I have a baby.’ ” He gave her as much flexibility as he could to work from home.
“Had it been someone else?” Hoppel wonders if a different team or a different executive would have been as lenient. “You know, I don’t know.”
Still, when Grace was two months old, they had to go to spring training. Hoppel traveled from Ohio to Florida in a car with her mother, daughter, and dog. There, the wife of a Cleveland coach babysat Grace so Hoppel could work.
All parents need the community to make raising kids feasible – supportive families, often some kind of childcare. But Hoppel was doing something a little bigger by figuring out how to find that support as a single mother and by building a life that included both baseball and a baby. She was, perhaps unwittingly, proving it could be done, making a case for flexible workplaces, and becoming a source of meaningful representation to other women in the industry.
Two decades after Hoppel adopted her daughter, she was in the Dominican Republic with a couple of coworkers, including Jennifer Wolf, the Guardians’ assistant director of player development for education and life skills. Wolf helps players adjust to life as a professional – and a grownup – and also assists Latin American players transition to life in the States, helping them get things such as a social security number, bank account, phone line, and a driver’s license.
Wolf wanted to be a mom, but relationships weren’t working out. She started to think she might be in a place to pursue parenthood on her own. She knew Grace was adopted and, while in the DR, she got a chance to ask Hoppel about the experience of single motherhood.
“That was part of what motivated me more to go ahead with it and not just talk about it. Because I thought, “Obviously, the company has supported me before in these situations,” Wolf claims. “I would not have felt comfortable in every organization doing something like this.”
Wolf worked with a fertility clinic to get pregnant on her own and earlier this year, as Wolf prepared to enter her seventh season with the Guardians, her son Micah was born.
The Guardians changed their parental leave policy two years ago. Now, non-birthing parents get six weeks paid leave and birthing parents get 12. This means Wolf is still home caring for Micah full-time, but she’s beginning to think about what it will look like when she returns to work.
Wolf asserts, “I think spaces for women have been an issue for a long time.” “And we think of it as a locker room, which is huge – having a place to change and go to the bathroom and shower and whatever. But then, when you’re thinking bigger picture about how you need a place to pump and store [breastmilk], I think we’re not always thinking about that.”
Wolf is aware that, in this regard, she is in a better position than some mothers or potential mothers working in baseball. She works out of the Guardians’ training complex in Arizona, where she has her own office that she can use to pump. Beyond that, the nature of her job means she’s interacting with players directly – but, if less so than for Hoppel, some portion of her work can be completed from home, or at least away from the field.
She asserts, “It is not like an affiliate hitting coach or something like that, where there is a lot more time at the field.” There are currently no female coaches at the major league level. Alyssa Nakken, who had been the first with the San Francisco Giants, actually joined the Guardians’ front office this winter. She has a young daughter who was born before her final season as a Giants coach. There are, however, increasing ranks of women coaching at the minor league level, with dreams of building sustainable careers in the sport. Not all of them will want to have kids someday, but presumably, some will. And if baseball isn’t accommodating mothers, then it’s not accommodating women.
It’s more than just the physical spaces, although those are critical. It’s a question of the culture. The irony, of course, is that plenty of men who work for teams also have kids. However, according to Wolf, the dads in baseball don’t seem to quite comprehend what it’s like to be a mom. “No, I think they appreciate their wives and what their wives go through to have kids and raise kids,” she says. “But for some reason, I think they don’t quite translate when it comes to the coworkers,” Maybe because, frankly, they’re not forced to consider it all that often. Wolf understood firsthand what Hoppel’s example had meant to her and she hopes her example can help change the expectations around what it means to be a parent who prioritizes both their career and their kid.
“I knew going into this that I was going to be the first woman in anyone’s memory to be in player development and have a kid. To be coming to the complex every day and have a baby,” she says. I thought, “I’m going to take my entire leave.” Because, why would I not, right? But sometimes the men don’t take their whole leave. I remember even when we had two weeks, [there were] guys taking two or three days. Go home, I told you. Like, what are you doing here?”
Regarding Wolf’s motherhood, Hoppel remarks, “I’m glad that I was able to help her.” “And, you know, she and my daughter are close.”
Grace is 21 years of age. She is a college student who also works for MLB as a photographer and videographer. Growing up around the game gave her comfort in the space that comes across in her portraits of players. Her mother is proud, but she is even happier that her daughter is working at a job she enjoys. “She’s actually on her way to Florida for spring training right now,” Hoppel says.
