BRAWLEY— When Dr. Marissa Vasquez walks into the Los Angeles Dodgers clubhouse, she brings far more than an alphabet of credentials. She carries with her the journey of a small-town kid from Imperial Valley who became one of the most influential women in sports medicine, now six years into her role as the Dodgers’ head team physician.

Vasquez has built a career most would consider a lifetime’s work. But medicine wasn’t always her plan. “I thought I was going to be a scientist,” she said during an interview with Imperial Valley Press. That changed during college when she was doing a research project in the middle of the night and realized the solitude wasn’t for her. She had been volunteering with a science group at a hospital and soon decided,” I really like people. I want to do medicine.”

Vasquez attended the University of California, Riverside, for her undergraduate degree, and then attended Temple University in Philadelphia for medical school. She returned to California for her family medicine residency at White Memorial Hospital in East Los Angeles. During those years, she found herself on the sidelines of high school football games, treating everything from asthma to sprains. That was the moment she said, when she was 100 percent sure. “I definitely want to do sports medicine,” she said.

Getting the Dodgers job during a global shutdown

Before joining the Dodgers Organization, Vasquez spent more than a decade treating collegiate and elite athletes. She directed a sports medicine fellowship, trained physicians, and reached a professional crossroads that led her to pursue an MBA to open new doors.

That door opened in 2020.

She applied for a joint UCLA-Dodgers position and was hired on March 1, days before the world shut down.

“I went in on my first day,” she said.  “A week later, sports across the country shut down,” she recalled.

Her introduction to Major League Baseball became an exercise in crisis management: remote oversight, testing protocols, and rewriting the rules of sports health on the fly. Even with a shortened season, the Dodgers won the 2020 World Series while she coordinated care from Los Angeles.

“It was not at all how I envisioned my very first year with the team,” Vasquez said.

She finally got to experience the World Series in person in 2024 and 2025. A highlight: playing games in Philadelphia, where she went to medical school, and traveling to Toronto with her family for Games 1 and 2. “It really did feel like a World Series,” she said. “We were in another country playing against a really excellent elite team.”

The hidden demands of baseball

While fans think of dramatic collisions or the occasional hit-by-pitch, most baseball injuries, Vasquez said, are the result of repetition. “There are 162 games in a regular season,” she said. “It really is about endurance,” Vasquez explained. “Overuse injuries are probably one of the biggest things we see.”

Her job isn’t only treating injuries, it’s preventing them. Sleep, she said, is one of the most overlooked components of athletic performance. With players constantly crossing time zones, performing while exhausted can become a big risk. “Sleep is a big component,” Vasquez noted. “It’s something we look at and screen for.”

Nutrition and recovery matter just as much in her patient teaching. The Dodgers employ strength coaches and physical therapists, and Vasquez sees her role as weaving everything together to keep players healthy through a grueling season.

From Ironman to the Special Olympics

Outside of baseball, Vasquez has cared for athletes across the spectrum—from Special Olympics competitors to Ironman athletes.

“Ironman is a special breed of athletes,” she said with a laugh. As a former triathlete herself, she understands both the physical and emotional demands.

“There’s this huge mental component,” Vasquez said. “The way they train is very different.

Her work with the Special Olympics World Games brought its own challenges: adapting care for athletes with physical and intellectual disabilities, communicating across dozens of languages, and leading medical operations at the UCLA venue. The event included “seven thousand athletes, seventy countries,” she noted—each with unique needs.

Representing home base

Public speaking has become another part of her mission, particularly mentoring medical students from underrepresented backgrounds. One main goal of hers is “to increase the diversity of the physician workforce across the country,” she said.

Her heart, though, has never left the Imperial Valley. “My family still lives in the Imperial Valley. I grew up in Brawley,” she said. She still returns several times a year.

In many ways, that small-town upbringing is the foundation she stands on today. She wants young people from places like Brawley to know they belong in rooms they’ve never seen.

“Growing up in Brawley, the resources are fairly limited… It’s not very visible to see all of the successful people that come out of Imperial Valley,” she said. “I think it’s important for kids to see that there’s so much opportunity… to follow your dreams.”

And she has become part of that visibility.

In the Dodgers’ long franchise history, Vasquez is the first Latina woman to hold her role.

“I’m the first Latina to hold this position,” she said—a milestone she doesn’t take lightly.

Her message to the next generation is simple, and it echoes the belief that carried her out of a town with “seven stoplights” and into baseball history: “You have to really believe something is possible before it’s even probable.”