Angie Mentink worked hard to make it back to T-Mobile Park before Opening Day.
When Angie Mentink stepped into the broadcast booth for Opening Day, it was a major win for her. Just a few weeks ago, her presence at T-Mobile Park was a long shot.
As Mariners players toiled through Spring Training in record heat, preparing for one of the franchise’s most anticipated seasons in years, Mentink was home in Seattle. On a recent afternoon, she sank into her couch, cradling a cup of coffee, and pointed to a translucent circular sticker on her chest: a heart monitor.
Mentink, the first female color commentator in Mariners history and a legendary softball player for the University of Washington, suffered a stroke on February 20.
She vividly remembers standing in her kitchen, sipping sparkling water, when her vision suddenly split. She closed her eyes and opened them again. Still double. She looked in the mirror and saw that one eye had drifted sharply to the side.
Mentink hugs Mariners catcher Mitch Garver (who had his own circuitous journey back to T-Mobile Park this year).
She made it to the couch, where her 18-year-old son, Chase, was asleep.
“Hey, bud, I need you to wake up,” she recalls telling him. “I’m gonna need your help”—which, she adds with a laugh, “is what every 18-year-old hates to hear.”
Chase wanted to call 911. Mentink resisted. Chase drove her to the emergency room himself, speeding there “Fast & Furious style,” he says. “He goes, ‘If I get pulled over, I’m just gonna point at you,'” Mentink remembers.
Her symptoms did not match the standard stroke warnings she knew. She had no slurred speech, no confusion, no obvious paralysis. That’s why she didn’t think the 911 call was necessary.
“She never thinks anything is wrong with her,” her husband, Jarrett, says. “That’s part of her. And it’s not a bad thing. It’s a great thing.”
At the hospital, she was taken straight for an MRI. When a nurse described her as a “stroke patient” over the radio, the label caught her off guard. Doctors initially suspected she may have had a transient ischemic attack, sometimes called a “ministroke.”
The next morning, things changed. She had a more severe and unmistakable stroke. When she tried to speak, the words would not come. One side of her face “melted,” Jarrett says. She was paralyzed on her left side.
For a brief stretch, Mentink feared what the stroke might mean for her future—her life, her career, the work she had fought so hard to do. Jarrett told her that if she had to stop working, it would be OK.
Mentink has been covering the Mariners since 1997—back when they played in the Kingdome.
“You set that bar for other women now. You’ve broken through that glass ceiling,” he said. “You’ve done it. Even if you can’t do this again…we can go on a different adventure.”
Soon, it became clear that Mentink’s next adventure would be fighting to get back to work at the post she had fought so hard to achieve in the first place. Six hours after her second stroke, she was already trying to communicate that she wanted to walk. She veered sharply to one side, fighting to center herself.
“It was a physical challenge,” she says. “People were like, ‘Do you want to sit down?’ And I was like, actually, standing is such a challenge. I just want to stand.”
Jarrett recalls a doctor marveling that they had never seen someone with that level of stroke so eager to get moving so quickly. “Meet Angie,” he says. “You tell her she can’t do something—good luck.”
That response—stubborn, competitive, faintly amused in the face of pain—is typical of the disposition that made Mentink a standout athlete long before she became one of the most recognizable voices in Seattle sports.
Before her broadcast career, Mentink played pro baseball with the Colorado Silver Bullets.
Mentink began covering the Mariners in 1997. She’d already been a star at the University of Washington and played professional baseball for the Colorado Silver Bullets. In 2001, she became the first University of Washington softball player inducted into the Husky Hall of Fame. But it took her more than two decades as a broadcaster to reach the booth as a color commentator. In 2021, she became the first female color commentator for the Mariners. In 2025, she became the first woman to serve in the role full-time.
That historic climb has not been clean or universally celebrated. Mentink has learned that some people are still comfortable with women in sports only up to a point. Hosting is fine. Reporting is fine. But analyzing the game with assurance, breaking down strategy—that, for some critics, remains harder to accept. “A lot of men just can’t stand it,” Jarrett says.
For generations, baseball audiences have been trained to hear male authority as background noise and female authority as interruption, Mentink says. When two men share a booth, their voices blend into the old familiar soundtrack of the sport. When Mentink speaks, some listeners hear the difference before they hear expertise.
“I thought so much of what I dealt with [earlier in my career] was so far behind me,” she says. “And then, coming into being the first female color commentator, it all came roaring back.”
Brad Adam, a Mariners broadcaster who has worked with Mentink since the early 2000s, says he was shocked by the hostility that followed her promotion. “We were both kind of taken aback,” he says.
Adam visited her in the hospital after the stroke and remembers her walking the halls like she was steering a shopping cart with a wobbly wheel. What did not surprise him was how quickly she began working toward her comeback.
Mentink hoped to attend spring training to catch up with players like Ryan Bliss, but the Mariners encouraged her to recover at home and aim for Opening Day.
“She’s gained another perspective with this, but it’s nothing that’s going to impede her for long or slow her down,” Adam says.
After all, nothing has in the past. When she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2017, Mentink tweeted: “Talk about ungrateful, after everything I did for my boobs, today I find out they are trying to kill me.”
Mentink's first concerns after the stroke were about her ability to process information quickly. She's constantly multitasking in the broadcast booth.
She brings the same candor and humor to her stroke recovery. Mentink understands her position as a role model. She knows that little girls are watching, yes, but so are grown women—women trying to imagine themselves inside jobs and spaces that were not built with them in mind.
“I think that people see themselves in me a lot,” she says. “Just being a mom…I gain weight, I lose weight, I have breast cancer, I have the same struggles as anybody else. And just to remind people that all of this is sort of normal in the scheme of things and on this journey of life.”
Physically, much of her recovery has come quickly. What scared her more at first was the possibility that the stroke might affect the quick thinking that underpins her job. “Multitasking, which I think is also my superpower—that seemed hard,” she says.
A baseball analyst is never simply watching a game. Mentink keeps score on an iPad, tracks player notes, watches pitch trends, listens to producers in her ear, and processes the rhythm of the game in real time.
“That seemed like a lot a week ago,” she says, resting on her couch. Every day it sounds a little easier.
Mentink reunites with former Mariners pitching coach Carl Willis, now with the Cleveland Guardians.
Originally, Mentink had been scheduled to spend four days in Arizona for two spring training broadcasts. After she got home from the hospital, she still wanted to go. She wanted time with the players before the regular-season grind. She wanted to return to baseball’s rhythms. She wanted normalcy. But the Mariners urged patience. Skip Arizona, they told her. Aim for Opening Day instead.
“They’ve been great,” Mentink says. “So that took a lot of stress off.”
At home, recovery has brought indignities. Jarrett recalls waking up on two separate nights to find Mentink had tried to make it to the bathroom on her own, only to run into a wall.
“Just full-on face-plant,” he says, clapping his hands together to mimic the collision. In the Mentink household, the falls became comic material. And humor has been a powerful coping mechanism. At one point during her recovery, Mentink could be spotted in a bedazzled pirate eyepatch.
Mentink has come a long way from crashing into walls at home. Here she is visiting with pitcher Bryan Woo ahead of Opening Day.
“In our family, even if you’re wounded, we ridicule,” says Mentink’s mother, Jackie Cooper. Cooper, who lives overseas, quickly boarded a flight home after the stroke. “Had to have a stroke to get me back.”
The experience has also sharpened Mentink’s perspective in serious ways. As she enters her second season as a color commentator, Mentink says she is less willing to let public criticism rob her of peace. “As important as it is that I have this job, it’s more important that I’m a mom and a wife.”
There’s a piece of advice Mentink often shares with her children. “There is no such thing as losing. You either win or you get better.”
Weeks ago, when Opening Day was on the horizon and Mentink was going to physical therapy, resting at home on the couch, healing inside and out, occasionally crashing into walls, she told herself she’d be there. She’d get better. And she did.