For two baseball-loving sisters, major-league careers honor a family history

WEST SACRAMENTO, Calif.

On Opening Day in West Sacramento, the Athletics asked a sold-out crowd to honor the late Rickey Henderson with 24 seconds of silence, a nod to his uniform number.

The voice making the request belonged to Amelia Schimmel, a 38-year-old Oakland native now in her sixth year as the teams public address announcer.

Advertisement Nearby in a suite at Sutter Health Park sat Joanna Schimmel, the assistant director of media relations for the Chicago Cubs.

Joanna, 36, was visiting with her teams baseball executives when the Henderson ceremony began.

Her job includes shepherding Cubs players through news interviews everywhere the team goes, be it in Northern California or at the Tokyo Dome, where the Cubs started this season.

Last week, the As-Cubs series received an abundance of attention because it marked the first home games for the As since the franchise left Oakland.

But there was another notable storyline behind the scenes.

In a sport long known for fathers and sons, like Ken Griffey Jr.

and Sr., and for brothers, like Joe, Dom and Vince DiMaggio, a pair of sisters were making their own mark.

Its funny, this is actually kind of the moment right now where Im thinking, Wow, this is really, really cool, Amelia said just before the series.

Because I keep doing this pinch-myself thing continually throughout my career, and I keep saying, Oh my gosh, this is my dream job, over and over again, and when am I going to wake up from this? Or Ashton Kutchers going to jump out and tell me Im being Punkd.

Amelia and Joanna have always been close, even as they bickered on softball fields as kids.

Sometimes when they were in a tiff, they would short-hop each other while playing catch, bouncing throws to make them harder to snag.

The recipient might be left with a bruised shin.

Were so similar in a lot of our mannerisms, and candidly, in the way we fight, Joanna said.

We are just super fiery, passionate women.

Thats just what our family is.

Both of our grandmas were that way.

Our mom is definitely that way.

And so we fight hard, but we love hard.

The Schimmel sisters were always sports-obsessed, and their career paths have intersected before.

At separate times, both worked for MLB Network, the Major League Baseball-run television station.

Joanna worked for MLBs international department and also for its compliance group.

The latter required her to make sure players were not improperly using their cell phones when they werent supposed to be in the wake of the Houston Astros electronic sign-stealing scandal.

Combined with jobs they also held in hockey another shared love they have many mutual acquaintances.

Advertisement Coming up in my career, every time I would tell somebody what my sister did, they would know her, because the sports world is so small, Joanna said.

They would be like, Oh, thats so cool! And yeah, it is really cool.

Sisterhood in sports can come with awkward moments, though.

The Schimmels are often confused for each other, even though they say they do not look that similar.

Amelia has held many conversations where she cannot tell if shes forgotten someones name or if shes been mistaken for Joanna.

It has almost always been the latter.

If youre around one of them, you still feel like the other ones there, which is a really special thing, said baseball broadcaster Stephen Nelson, who got to know the sisters through MLB Network.

Amelia is just one of those people whos friends with everybody, and everybody loves her.

This is not a safe-for-print quote, but like, I wouldnt f with Jo.

Theres just a certain power to her, and its really cool to be around.

The series in Sacramento was only the second time Joannas Cubs had visited the As while Amelia has been their PA announcer.

The first was in 2023, in a moment that was particularly special because it came at the Oakland Coliseum, where the sisters grew up with season tickets to the As.

Thats where we fell in love with baseball, Joanna said.

I always knew it was cool that we both worked in sports, but thats where it really became special.

It was emotional.

Standing there with my mom, whos put in so much for me and my sister I dont want to say we had a tough go, we were super fortunate as a family.

But we lost my dad when I was 11 years old, and my mom all of a sudden became a single mom and had to put two kids through college.

The Schimmels love for baseball is a father-daughter story, but it is also a mother-daughter story.

To Amelia, there was no question that Joanna and I were going to do something that was out of the norm for what people expect for women to do in their industry, because a pioneer was already in the family.

Their paternal grandmother, Gertrude Schimmel, was the first woman to reach the rank of captain in the New York Police Department.

Advertisement The New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Anna Quindlen once wrote that Gertrude had a voice that could crush rocks.

Amelia lived with her for a time in New York, and while in college at Brown University, Joanna would meet friends in the city and stay over.

There were nights where wed go out and wed come back home at one or two in the morning, and my grandmas sitting up watching poker at her kitchen table, drinking an Amstel Light, Joanna said.

Shed be like, You girls are home so early.

Go to bed.

Im gonna go to bed soon.

I just want to finish watching this.

I was like, Wow, my grandmas putting me to shame.

Gertrude died in 2015, at 96.

Her son Victor Schimmel, father to Amelia and Joanna, had already been gone for a decade and a half.

Victor died of a brain aneurysm in 2000 at age 51.

He first suffered an aneurysm in the mid-1990s, but for about five years, he appeared fully recovered.

A hospital executive for much of his career, he was on a trip to LA for a presentation in 2000 when he suffered another aneurysm and collapsed.

Amelia and Joanna were pulled out of school to fly south to go see him, but he was already unconscious when they arrived.

It was unexpected, Amelia said.

I was a freshman.

High schools already a pretty awful time.

There is a lot of pressure and a lot of reasons that Joanna and I dont remember a ton in the following year.

My mom had to become both parents, and she was already a total badass.

Their mother, Sydney Firestone Schimmel, grew up as a Mets fan on Long Island and went into finance.

She met her husband, a Yankees fan from the Bronx, at Columbia University while both pursued graduate degrees in mathematics.

Baseball was central to their relationship before they eventually passed their love for the game to their daughters.

Naturally, Victor enjoyed statistics, and when he brought the kids to the Coliseum, he would offer quarter bets over the outcome of the next play.

That was their connection with him, always going to events, being a spectator, being active, Sydney said.

Sports were what they had in common.

After Victor died, Sydney kept going to As games with the girls and shuttled them to their youth sports events.

Amelia played baseball early in high school after pushing the school to allow her to do so because there was no softball team.

One was later started and she switched over with an eye towards playing in college, which she did at Brandeis University.

Joanna played softball in college, too.

Advertisement One of the most important things that (our mom) did to keep us feeling normal was letting us continue to do the activities that maybe she wasnt quite as avid about, Amelia said.

But I think she did it for her, too.

But for all the ubiquity of sports in their lives, Sydney never expected her daughters would end up in the roles they hold today.

Absolutely not, said Sydney, who drove in from Oakland for this weeks As-Cubs series.

I was a professional in a field where it was very hard for women to succeed or to rise.

Im seeing both of them now in a field that is so male-dominated that the conversation is so often about, If you were a guy, what would happen? Where would you be? The fact that theyve managed to jump in and just stick to it, it makes me proud.

Amelia is one of four women in regular PA roles across Major League Baseball.

She was an executive producer working on in-game production for the As when the pandemic arrived.

For safety reasons, the longtime incumbent announcer, Dick Callahan, chose to temporarily step away in 2020, and the As asked Schimmel to give it a try.

Callahan died in 2021.

During her first game, Amelia was so nervous that her hand shook while she introduced the first batter, and she couldnt read her script.

Shes cool and composed now and has even taken voice lessons.

I didnt even realize the things that I didnt even think about, she said.

What types of foods should you eat or not eat before youre announcing a big game? Green apples are good because they create saliva.

But coffee and salty foods arent good for your voice.

How to sound out certain different words in order to put emphasis on them.

Gestures that you can make with your hands, or ways that you can push energy through your feet instead of putting all the onus on your throat, which ends up kind of closing up if youre in a nervous situation.

Amelia works hard at her craft, but has found that there will always be some people she cannot please.

Plenty of times, she has been told she should not be in her position, and that it should belong to a man instead.

She has often felt she has not received the benefit of the doubt in the same way her male peers have.

Advertisement I had to do a lot of proving to people that I deserve to be in a place, she said.

One of the harder experiences, she said, has been seeing peers effectively driven out of sports: women with top qualifications who leave in tears because there were just so many extraneous factors that made it very uncomfortable for them to be in the industry.

Joanna, who was the first woman to regularly travel to road games with the San Jose Sharks of the NHL, has encountered scrutiny as well.

Ive definitely dealt with people questioning my ability to do things, or if I belong somewhere doubting that I actually do this job, and things like that, Joanna said.

Her role requires prepping players for media, monitoring interviews and handling various communications and coordination efforts, be it with national broadcasters or other stakeholders beyond local writers.

She thought she would be a teacher growing up, and in many ways, she is, helping players learn how to approach various situations, sometimes with high stakes.

There can be some small but unique struggles on the road, though, when there arent many other women around.

If your suitcase gets lost, you have no one to share makeup or hair products, Joanna said.

But both Joanna and Amelia hope their presence can help inspire women looking to enter the field.

Im really proud to be a woman in this space.

So proud, Joanna said.

Proud of myself, proud of people who have come before me and people Ive been able to learn from, but also proud of what that means potentially to people coming after me.

The Schimmel sisters still throw short-hops to one another, if just verbally.

In Amelias first year as the PA announcer at the Oakland Coliseum, her sister and mother came to the park to celebrate the full-circle journey.

One of Amelias more cherished pictures is one she took in the control room of her mother and sister waving from below.

They joked with her afterward, My God, we have to hear your voice here, too? Advertisement But shared days at the ballpark, like those last week, also carry heavy emotion.

We wish that our dad had witnessed any of this, Amelia said.

We didnt get to show him that we both ended up going into sports.

Because he would have been absolutely just tickled by that.

(Top photo of Joanna and Amelia at the As-Cubs series with their mother, Sydney, courtesy of the Schimmel family).

This article has been shared from the original article on theathleticuk, here is the link to the original article.