PORTLAND, Maine — If you think that being a baseball play-by-play announcer on the radio would be a pretty terrific job, consider the less than glamorous work that has to be done when starting out. After Emma Tiedemann graduated from college, her first job was as an unpaid intern broadcasting for the Mat-Su Miners in Palmer, Alaska, population 6,000.
“I got paid in a flight, round trip from Texas to Alaska, and a host family,” she recalls. Despite the nonexistent income, it was a terrific experience. “That’s when I fell in love with the game of baseball and going to the ballpark every single day.”
This is Tiedemann’s first season on the air as the radio announcer for the Portland Sea Dogs. She was supposed to be in the broadcast booth last year, but the season was scrapped because of Covid, and the team put her and other employees to work on tasks that weren’t in their job descriptions. “We sanded and painted all the handrails. So any handrails that are green,” she says with a smile, “I probably painted those.”
Tiedemann is a rarity, one of just five female play-by-play announcers in professional baseball. As a teenager, she had no role models to look up to. Now she’s in contact with several young women in college who have watched her rise in broadcasting and hope one day to do what she’s doing.
“It’s really cool to see that we do have the next generation coming up,” she says. “And it’s not going to a couple of years removed. It’s going to be next year when a new wave of females follows behind us.”