From Cal League All-Star Games (RIP) to the big leagues, apparently.
“Weird” doesn’t even begin to describe this year in general. I lost the Modesto Nuts, but I started covering Sacramento more – both the Athletics and the River Cats. I was there almost every Saturday I could be and some weekdays, too, depending on anything else in my schedule.
I’ve been on a team beat before, when I was a grad student at the University of Southern California. I did women’s volleyball in the fall and baseball in the spring. It was enough for me to learn that I didn’t necessarily enjoy being on a beat, so I never pursued becoming one and covering an MLB team.
Instead, I stuck around the Cal League and eventually found my way to writing the stories I always wanted to write. I was a weirdo nerd teenager who remembers reading Garrett Broshuis’ Baseball America blogs almost religiously, learning more about the day-to-day life of a minor leaguer. I was in rural California and Las Vegas — it was so much easier to head to a minor league game than to get to Los Angeles or San Francisco. I always wondered why it wasn’t written about as much as the big leagues, unless it was about a star prospect.1
After 13 seasons, I’m The Minor League Person, which is a title I relish, don’t get me wrong. All those years of building up relationships and sourcing across the Cal League, the PCL, and more has only helped me in the long run; it’s helped me understand baseball more beyond just the big leagues. Knowledge is everything as a journalist, I think.
I’ve written before how my role is now encompassing baseball economics as a whole, and how for the foreseeable future, I’ll be writing about labor. I’m excited at this idea — I’m also glad to put the economics minor I did in undergrad to use. That unfinished MPP I did?2 At least I can explain graduate level macroeconomic theory when it comes to labor economics in a way that isn’t all mumbo jumbo theories and concepts. I’m excited to tell stories about things that not only matter to me, a person who hyperfixated on studying economics in high school, but is a microcosm of labor relations as a whole in the United States.
I was once told by a professor3 that sports mirror what is going on in society. As someone with an English degree and is neurodivergent, my brain cannot shut off the critical thinking, especially when I am reporting on sports. “You are the watchdogs, not the lapdogs, of your administration” is still burned into my brain from my college newsroom. Maybe I am too Sorkin-y to a massive fault — I’m aware this is one of my most toxic traits — but I still believe in journalism as a tool to inform people of facts and to hold people in power accountable. Going up to the big leagues primarily in 2026 won’t change that, but all I hope is that it’s what I exemplify in the press rooms.
More 2025
I frightened Pat McAfee
Not just causing him to short circuit on live television!
so after media day, I went over to Truist and was just trying to get to where I needed to go and I crossed paths with Pat McAfee on field level and he like tried to smile and wave at me and he had this air of nervousness to him and I just glared at him and kept walking.
— jen ramos-eisen 🇵🇭 (@jenramose.online) 2025-07-17T18:57:20.965Z
I was almost a Pope Niece
Which is still a great potential band name. But alas, I remain just a Cardinal niece. s/o to Tito Tagle for that one. (To explain my lineage and how we’re related, he’s my mom’s cousin on my maternal grandmother’s side. Relatedly, my great-great-great-grandfather and Tito Tagle’s great-great-grandfather is a hero of my mom’s province and has a wikipedia page.)I wrote! A lot!
My big story was my reporting on Diamond Baseball Holdings, which I spent nearly two years looking into. They are up to 48 Minor League teams owned, and four more private equity backed firms have entered the space and are buying teams. I say this to many people — the Minor Leagues is where I grew up and learned to be the reporter I am now. I don’t know what PE has in store for MiLB, but it is hard not to be concerned knowing the effect PE has in a lot of industries.I saw Rilo Kiley five times
I never got to see them in their original run as a teenager because, well, why would my mother let teenage me go to the Strip alone to go to concerts? In retrospect, great parenting move on her part. By the time I started becoming a regular concert goer in college, Rilo Kiley confirmed they had broken up when rkives was released. I resigned myself to accepting I would never see them live. When they announced they would be touring, it was my Oasis reunion. I just had to go. Out of a conversation with one of my friends, a fellow RK fan, I hit upon the realization that this was so different for me than any of the bands I see an ungodly amount: hearing Jenny Lewis sing sweetly about mental illness hit upon a specific space in my own mentally ill brain as a teenager. It was different to hear it coming from someone femme, let alone someone who I share a name with and also a hometown. Every city I saw them in was significant to various parts of my life. I got to see them five times more than I ever thought I would; that alone is such a treat for me.Mr. Met turned me into the joker
It’s a long story, but this was part of it.
HOW DOES MR MET GET A GOLF CART BEFORE ME
— jen ramos-eisen 🇵🇭 (@jenramose.online) 2025-07-15T17:58:54.901Z
I turned my pal and colleague Eric Stephen into a meme
One of my proudest accomplishments while on assignment in Los Angeles this summer. If you know his penchant for puns, you understand why this has become a meme.
I made two versions, for every occasion possible.
I ended up at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony
I had no clue this was even something that was open to the public until this year. It was, hands down, one of the coolest events I have ever gotten to witness live and Janelle Monáe singing “Hey Ya” during the OutKast tribute will live in my mind forever.I got BBWAA
I know this isn’t usually a big deal. It’s part of the job, especially if you start off as a beat, which is typically (but not always) how it goes in this industry. That wasn’t my path, though. I went in a non-traditional direction and stuck to writing about what I cared about and what I thought mattered and I still got here. I still became a national writer and I still get to write about things that I think matters.
More importantly, I think, this is about my grandfather. I never got to meet my paternal grandfather, since he passed away before I was born. Everything I know about him has been stories I’ve been told by my dad and other relatives on that side of the family. For whatever reason, I had forgotten that in addition to his post-WWII career, he was a writer, including writing for the Veterans Federation of the Philippines.
He and my great-grandfather survived the Bataan Death March; the story I know is that my grandpa was marching in one direction while my great-grandpa was marching in another and that was how they both found out they were in the death march. Bataan is my paternal family’s province, one that’s felt the effects of the war and martial law through my immediate family’s lifetime. My grandpa was belligerent toward authority figures who deserved it. I can see where I get it from now.
When I told my dad I had applied, he said that if I got it, my grandpa would be so proud of me. I’m carrying that with me, knowing the systemic and generational trauma my family’s carried at the hands of nearly 400 years of colonization.
Nothing enraged me more this year than seeing that Rob Manfred compared free agency to the Bataan Death March, a quote that made me seethe and curse in Filipino. Bastos na bastos naman itong paghahambing; putang ina niya. I go into 2026 with the goal of continuing to make my grandfather proud, and holding punyetas accountable for their words.
1 I went to a lot of Fresno Grizzlies games as a teenager and did, in fact, get to see Buster Posey before he got called up. But I do remember reading more about him in the sense that he was gonna be a star hitting catcher than, say, Joe Borchard or Brock Bond or Alex Hinshaw. I saw Brett Wallace with the Las Vegas 51s! Which, that was also someone who was written about in a way that was more about being a highly ranked prospect at the time. Relatedly, the 2009 and 2010 Fresno Grizzlies are a deep cut of Remembering Some Guys in my mind.
2 I dropped out because the director of the policy school doubled down on weird transphobia and ableism in a DEI for public policy course so I called her an herb and bounced.
3 Unfortunately, I have since fought this professor on twitter for spouting transphobic nonsense during the 2024 Olympics, with him knowing full well I was an out nonbinary person at USC. This anecdote I learned in his class is now a classic “heartbreaking: worst person you know makes a good point.”