Meet Ashley MacLennan from Bless You Boys, Bleed Cubbie Blue, and DRays Bay

We have dozens of women covering pro and college sports for our team brands here at SB Nation. Meet one of those talented writers, Ashley MacLennan, who writes for several of our MLB blogs.

My earliest memory of baseball was watching the Toronto Blue Jays win the World Series in 1993. I was nine years old and was just enraptured by the excitement of it all. Unfortunately, the following season was the strike, and my limited attention span couldn’t hold onto my baseball love. Much later, in my 20s, I was re-introduced to baseball by a boyfriend who was a huge Detroit Tigers fan, and watching the games with him I fell in love with the sport all over again, and with the Tigers specifically. Since then I have also found that same excitement in covering the Rays and the Cubs.

Getting to have the whole game-day press box experience with the Rays this summer was such an incredible moment for me. Just being up in the press box, getting to talk to guys in the clubhouse, and Kevin Cash in the dugout. It was surreal to be a part of it, and the team couldn’t have been nicer about making me feel welcome on my first go-round. I hope it’s something I get to repeat many more times in the future.

It’s tough. When I first started out I had some friends suggest I should use a fake (male) name to do my writing, but I rejected that idea outright. I’ve gotten my fair share of really awful comments (mostly about my appearance and weight, naturally) and some were downright violent (thanks to a domestic violence article I wrote), but I think it’s important that young women who want to get into this as a career can see women out there doing it actively and not hiding behind a fake name. Women belong in sports media.

I started out writing FanPosts for Bless You Boys, and then applied to become a staff writer. I pretty quickly started taking that way too seriously, and branched out to two other SBN sites, so a good chunk of my life is now dedicated to writing about baseball.

So many great examples! Stacey May Fowles, who makes writing about baseball a beautiful art form. Meg Rowley, who used to write for Lookout Landing is one of the best, and I’ve been lucky enough to be edited by her for The Hardball Times. Katie Strang at The Athletic is tough, smart, and so incredible at what she does, but so open to others in the industry. Emily Waldon is one of the best champions out there for female writers and is doing a great job at achieving her own dreams, it’s really inspiring. And women like Kim Ng, Heather Nabozny (head groundskeeper for the Tigers, first female head groundskeeper), Justine Siegal (first woman to coach an MLB team, in spring training), and Sue Falsone (former Dodgers head athletic trainer, first female head athletic trainer), who broke ground in new and different ways in baseball, and have done so much to prove that women belong in the sport.