Babe’s Babes Podcast: Women in Baseball Week Panel w/ Kelley Franco Throop, Jason Klein & Perry Barber

In celebration of our first Women in Baseball Week as the Babe's Babes, we decided to do a little something different with this episode. We invited three individuals—whom we consider to be Women in Baseball Week icons—to spend the hour with us. In this episode, you'll hear from Kelley Franco Throop, Jason Klein, and Perry Barber. 

Kelley is a baseball media entrepreneur. Her company is called Three Inning Fan LLC. She is the host of her own podcast, “A Date in October with KFT”. Kelley has been a guest lecturer at the Baseball Hall of Fame and former baseball contributor on CNN’s Financial Network. By day, Kelley is a practicing attorney. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram at @threeinningfan to catch her “Three Inning Minute” videos, which feature one minute snippets about the legal, transactional, and nostalgic side of baseball.

Jason, as you know from Episode No. 8, is a writer and sports blogger with over twenty years of experience. He is the author of YES PEPPER, an empowering new book for girls who play baseball. Jason has always enjoyed sharing his passion for baseball with his two daughters.  He coaches youth baseball and is an advocate for girls getting a fair opportunity in the game. When his call for Twitter followers to share their support for his daughter, Ava, who wanted to know if girls could play baseball went viral on Twitter, Jason’s push for equality garnered support from Major League Baseball, Little League International and USA Women’s Baseball.  He was also featured on MLB Network, the YES Network and in the Washington Post. Follow Jason on Twitter @ByJasonKlein and @YesPepperBook.

Perry has been establishing a lot of "firsts" and "onlys" in baseball for over four decades. She’s the only woman so far to umpire major league exhibitions in both the U.S. and Japan, and one of very few women to umpire major league spring training games in the U.S. She’s the winner of the first SABR Women in Baseball Lifetime Achievement Award, nicknamed “The Dorothy” after revered researcher and writer Dorothy Seymour Mills, and is also a Jeopardy! champion, a Mensa member, an identical twin, a published author in her own right as well as the subject of numerous magazine articles, newspaper profiles, and books. And as if we didn't find her impressive already, in her former life as a singer/songwriter/guitarist, she was the opening act for Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, Hall and Oates, and other music luminaries. In 2008 Perry assembled the first and (so far) only four-woman crew to umpire a major league spring training game. She was selected as an alternate umpire for the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, has taught umpiring to public school students in New York City while securing paying assignments for them with local associations, and is the first woman to have umpired in the Cape Cod League; this year (2023,) she is thrilled to note, two more women are umpiring in the CCL, ten years after she did. She’s a New York State Baseball Hall of Fame inductee, and her photograph is on display at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown with her name on a plaque on the wall next to it, but she’s not resting on her laurels; she still works tirelessly to recruit and train other women umpires in order to render the phrase "woman umpire" as redundant as "female podcaster" or "woman astrophysicist.” After more than forty years, Perry is still fighting not to be in a league of her own. She is on Twitter @perrybarber.