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by Gin Phillips
In April 2006, New York Mets announcer Keith Hernandez noticed Kelly Calabrese in
the San Diego Padres dugout. The long hair threw him off—he
huffed and puffed about the idea of
a girl in the dugout. “Who is the girl
in the dugout, with the long hair?”
Hernandez said on air. “You have got
to be kidding me. Only player personnel
in the dugout.”
The girl happened to be the first
full-time female massage therapist
hired by a Major League Baseball
team. Once Hernandez found out
her position, he threw in an addendum
to his first remarks.
“I won’t say women belong in the
kitchen, but they don’t belong in the
dugout,” he said.
This did not go over well. Hernandez’s
comments set off a firestorm
of criticism, and he later publicly
apologized. The Padres’ leadership
and players weighed in, arguing that
gender was irrelevant when it came
to the contribution Calabrese made
to team training and performance.
Calabrese herself was shocked when
she realized she was suddenly the
focus of national attention.
“It was my third year being fulltime,
so I don’t know why he just noticed
me then,” Calabrese says. “My
players were just blown away. They
were saying if we don’t care and the
manager doesn’t care, why should
someone on the outside care? Nobody
looks at me as a girl in there.”
It took Calabrese years to get to
the dugout. She started working
with Cleveland Indians players in
1995, and when those players were
traded to the Atlanta Braves, they
asked her if she’d still work on them
during spring training. That led to
connections to other Braves players,
including first baseman Ryan
Klesko. Klesko had some of the best
years of his career in the late ’90s,
and when he was traded to the Padres,
he asked Calabrese to come
with him to California.
“He said, ‘I know you have a huge
client list, but I really need you to
come with me,’” Calabrese recalls.
“Ryan assured me he’d help me get
on board here.”
She knew her goal was to work
full-time for a team, and so far she’d
only been working on individual
players. It had been a long and varied
line—whenever a team came in
to play the Indians, they’d call Calabrese
in to work on their players—
but she hadn’t been able to become
part of the team. Klesko was offering
her a shot at that, although it wasn’t
even close to a sure thing.
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American Massage Therapy Association®
