When Jen Pawol walks onto the field at Truist Park this weekend, she wont just be making history shell be cashing in on a decades-long grind through the most thankless job in sports.On Saturday afternoon, Pawol will become the first female umpire to work a regular-season Major League Baseball game, handling the bases in Game 1 of the Atlanta Braves-Miami Marlins doubleheader before moving behind the plate for Sundays series finale.She was sitting in a Nashville hotel room on Wednesday when the news came down.CLICK HERE FOR MORE SPORTS COVERAGE ON FOXNEWS.COM"I was overcome with emotion," Pawol told the Associated Press on Thursday. "It was super emotional to finally be living that phone call that Id been hoping for and working towards for quite a while, and I just felt super full I feel like a fully charged battery ready to go."Her path here was anything but fast-tracked. Pawol began umpiring baseball in 2016 in Rookie ball, after years of calling NCAA softball games. Since then, shes worked her way methodically through the minors the New York/Penn League, the Midwest League, the South Atlantic League, Double-A, and finally Triple-A in 2023. That season, she became the first woman to umpire in Triple-A in 34 years and the first to work its championship game."This has been over 1,200 minor league games, countless hours of video review trying to get better, and underneath it all has just been this passion and this love for the game of baseball," Pawol said. "This started in my playing days as a catcher and transformed over into an umpire, and I think its gotten even stronger as an umpire. Umpiring is for me, its in my DNA. Its been a long, hard journey."A three-time all-conference catcher at Hofstra and a 2001 world champion with the U.S. womens softball team, Pawol first picked up an umpires mask thanks to a friends invitation in high school in the early 1990s. She made $15 per game during that gig.ANGELS SLUGGER YOAN MONCADA MISSES GAME TO TAKE US CITIZENSHIP TEST"It was a one-umpire system," she recalled. "I had no idea what I was doing, but I got to put gear on and call balls and strikes, so I was in."Shes been "in" ever since even when thenbig league umpire Ted Barrett warned her at a 2015 tryout camp that it could take a decade in the minors before shed see a major league ballpark."I warned her: Look, this is what youre up against," Barrett said. "Its going to be 10 years in the minor leagues before you sniff a big league field.'"That prediction was almost exactly right. Pawols call-up makes MLB the third of the "Big Four" mens professional sports leagues to feature a female official, following Violet Palmers NBA debut in 1997 and Sarah Thomas NFL debut in 2015. Thomas went on to work Super Bowl LV between the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Kansas City Chiefs. The NHL is now the lone holdout.Pawol wont be alone this weekend. The 48-year-old said about 30 family members and friends will be in the stands to witness her historic debut. Many of her fellow minor-league umpires who blazed the trail before her, including Christine Wren, Pam Postema and Ria Cortesio, have already reached out with congratulations.When Postema told her years ago to "Get it done!" Pawol promised she would. "I texted her yesterday and said, 'Im getting it done!'"OutKick will be on the ground at Truist Park to cover Pawol's first three MLB games.In an era where headlines often favor symbolism over merit, Jen Pawols journey stands as a reminder that grit still matters.Pawol isn't here as a token gesture or a puffy PR move. Shes here because she outlasted the bus rides, the blistering summer heat and the lonely grind of minor league life. And now, for the first time, a woman has made it to the bigs.Follow Fox News Digitals sports coverage on X, and subscribe to the Fox News Sports Huddle newsletter.