Amanda Hopkins recently spoke on a panel about women in baseball. She works for the Seattle Mariners—the first full-time female scout in more than 50 years. But Hopkins doesn’t want to be seen as a trailblazer. She’s a scout. That’s it.
While she’s believed to be the first full-time baseball scout since Edith Houghton in the middle of the 20th century, Hopkins has been around baseball since she was a child.
She comes by her love of baseball honestly. Her father Ron is a scout too.
As an eight-year-old, Hopkins would run the radar gun and pass along the speeds to her dad. People would ask her, “What do you want to do when you grow up?”
She’d say, “I want to be a baseball scout.” Hopkins thinks most people thought she’d outgrow the idea.
She didn’t.
When the Mariners first hired her, Hopkins didn’t talk much about her place in baseball history. She wanted more experience before speaking about a career that was just getting started.
Now she’s starting to get comfortable with the history she’s made. But she doesn’t want that to be her entire story in baseball.
“I have so much to learn still,” Hopkins says. “My dad, 40 years into scouting, is still learning something every time he goes to the park.”
She adds, “I just want to be the best area scout I can be right now.”
(AP Photo: Amanda Hopkins, second from right, shakes hands with Jeneane Lesko, who played for the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League in the 1950s.)
