There’s an image that makes Jaxen Mentink smile when talking about one of the biggest role models in his life.
In fairness, he’s been smiling for the previous 10 minutes standing in a stairwell of Sutter Health Park because he loves talking about this person. The lessons, the character, the influence that helped mold him into the person he is first, and the baseball player he is as a freshman at Sacramento City College.
At this moment, Jaxen is talking about the hours spent in the batting cage at the family home along with his younger brother Chase, and the rubber-armed pitcher throwing a countless mix of fastballs and curves trying to make the kids better.
“She literally threw 80 to 100 pitches, at least. And her warmup was her standing here, throwing two balls into the net and saying, ‘All right, let’s go.’ She’d have a glass of wine in one hand and then throwing a ball in the other. I’m not kidding,” Jaxen said.
When told later that Jaxen mentioned this method of throwing batting practice in the cage, Angie Mentink gives one of those, “Did my kid really say that?” looks. But before the conversation ends, she’s pulled out her phone to show the pictures — glass of wine in the left hand, baseball in the right and each of her boys in the batter’s box.
“She’s my best hitting coach. She’s taught me every single fundamental about my game, besides my catching, which I’ve learned from other people that she got me with,” Jaxen said. “I’m the player I am today, literally all because of her.”
Mom. Hitting coach. Batting practice pitcher. Reporter. Baseball broadcast analyst. All rolled into one.
But Mom – and wife to husband Jarrett – always comes first.
“That’s always my first priority, my kids and my family, and then everything else,” she says.
For 30 years Angie Mentink has been a public figure in some capacity in the Seattle area. Star softball player at UW. Trailblazer who spent two years playing for the Colorado Silver Bullets, a professional women’s baseball team that traveled the country in the mid-1990s. Award-winning host and reporter for the various incarnations of what is now ROOT Sports and seemingly on television every night since her first role in 1997.
This season, her career entered a new chapter as the first woman to be a full-time broadcast analyst in Mariners history. It was a part-time role last year before the M’s made the permanent move to have Mentink work among a rotating crew of analysts this year along with Ryan Rowland-Smith, Jay Buhner and Dave Valle.
“I’m just so proud of her, which is weird saying because, like, I’m her son and I feel like it would be like she’s proud of me for a lot of things. But the barriers that she’s broken and the records she’s achieved, and just the accomplishments that she has done in this industry, where a lot of it has been dominated by men, and she has just blossomed in it is phenomenal,” Jaxen said. “And just as her son, I hope that she inspires other young women to go and do this kind of thing, and to go and just stand out and be great. I get goose bumps talking about it. It’s awesome. I mean, it’s just the coolest thing ever.”
Stepping into the analyst role is challenging and perhaps a little daunting. Fans are going to have opinions, especially when tied to a polarizing franchise like the Mariners.
For Mentink, being the analyst feeds into what she loves about the game that has defined so much of her life. She likes the nuance and small details, and tries to bring that to the broadcast.
“I get maybe to a fault very granular about what’s being thrown and what’s happening and the little things within the game that I’ve just always loved finding and picking out,” Mentink said. “Even from the time that I was a player, I was always the one that was trying to pick the third base coach’s signs, or trying to figure out if I could pick something up on the catcher’s stance. Any of the tiny things in the game. So being an analyst allows you to sort of get back to just finding those cool things within a game and being able to talk about them, and then hopefully along the way I’ll get better at talking about them.”
It’s not lost on Mentink that this change for her professionally is coming in a year of personal change in the family household with Jaxen now off to college. Chase, 17, is finishing his junior year at Mount Si High School and is “coming out of his shell” a little more with Jaxen now at college. Jarrett is a professor at Seattle Pacific University.
Mentink’s first stint in the analyst chair for the Mariners came in 2021. Her promotion into a full-time role this season makes her a rarity within the baseball broadcast community. Jessica Mendoza is the most prominent female game analyst working both for ESPN and the Los Angeles Dodgers, but Mentink is one of a very small number of women in baseball either in a play-by-play or analyst role.
“I don’t want to knock us as hosts and say that she does a lot more, but she does a lot more,” said ROOT Sports reporter and host Brad Adam, who has worked with Mentink since 2000. “Now there’s prep work for hosts, but it’s a different level for a game. She realized that and she has embraced that role. She is doing all the sites and the stats and looking up everything, and what I think is really smart, too, she’s also asking producers questions. She’s asking Aaron (Goldsmith) questions a lot, like where you find stuff, or what you research, or how do you look things up, or what’s important in a broadcast. She really wants to learn and she wants to be good.”
That Mentink is taking on the challenge of a role where barriers remain for women is part of who she is. She did it when she played for the Silver Bullets some 30 years ago. She did it when she started and coached youth baseball teams for her kids.
It’s evident to those that work with her. It’s evident to her kid.
“Take away from the fact that it is my mom, she is just inspiring, hopefully, so many other people to do the same,” Jaxen said. “I think knowing that she’s making a difference as a role model not just to me — she’s my biggest role model by far — but to so many others is just a really, really cool thing to see.”