No. 28: Oakland/Las Vegas/Nomad Athletics

Did Jenny Cavnar really name her son after Vin Scully?

Look, there really isn’t all that much to be happy about with the A’s right now. The team is moving to Las Vegas… unless they’re not moving to Las Vegas. Who even knows? The mayor of Las Vegas doesn’t think they should. Teachers are suing. Nobody seems to think the proposed stadium in Vegas actually works, and nobody seems to know when it will be finished, assuming it’s built at all, and nobody knows where the A’s will play in the meantime, and nobody seems entirely sure if Las Vegas is even a viable big-league baseball market in the first place.

Meanwhile, the team is dreadful, and the owner has no interest in making them anything other than dreadful, and there will probably be several sub-2,000 people crowds at Oakland games this year, and it just breaks your heart for those true A’s fans who did absolutely nothing to deserve this.

So… instead, let’s have a little chat with Jenny Cavnar!

This year, Cavnar will be the primary play-by-play broadcaster for the A’s, making her the first female primary play-by-play person in MLB. It’s important to say—as you will see, Jenny insists on this being clarified—that she is not the first female MLB broadcaster. But she is the first female to be the official voice of a team, and that’s something very special.

Jenny is a Colorado native, and she was broadcasting for the Rockies, so she was already living kind of a dream life. But this opportunity to break through—made even more special because she will be broadcasting with longtime friend Dallas Braden—was too good an opportunity to pass up. I talked to her a bit about what this means, what it will be like to be a broadcaster for a troubled franchise and, yes, her son Vince, named for Vin Scully: