Alexandra Noboa is trilingual. She's fluent in English, Spanish -- and baseball. And she's parlayed that versatility and expertise into an important role with the St. Louis Cardinals.

Noboa, 29, is in her second season as the team's international communications specialist/Spanish translator, a front-office position in which she helps Spanish-speaking players communicate with English-speaking reporters. It helps, too, that she previously worked in broadcast media in the Miami area after she received her master's degree in multimedia journalism at Florida International University.

During baseball games, Alexandra Noboa typically gives fans updates on the Cardinals' Spanish-language social media accounts. After the game, she translates player interviews. St. Louis Cardinals

She was born in Puerto Rico but grew up in Wisconsin to parents from Colombia and the Dominican Republic. Her dad played baseball as an amateur into his late 50s and was an ardent follower of the Pirates and Red Sox, so Alexandra rooted for them, too, along with her hometown Brewers. Her second cousin, Junior Noboa (whom she considers an uncle), played in the majors as an infielder and is a longtime Arizona Diamondbacks executive and general manager of the Licey Tigres in the Dominican Republic. That she learned baseball at an early age wasn't a surprise.

"My dad has always been a crazy baseball fan, and I grew up watching it," she says.

What was a surprise is the fact that she wound up in the majors. Her goal wasn't to work in professional sports. She studied political science, Latin American studies and Spanish at the University of Wisconsin at Madison (her mother teaches at Wisconsin-Whitewater) before going to grad school. She then worked a few months as a producer and reporter in Miami radio and TV before taking a job with Major League Baseball as a social media reporter and coordinator. That opened the door to working for the Cardinals.

Now, she spends every day with the team -- from spring training through the end of the season -- at home and on the road, helping with interviews, updating the team's Spanish-language Twitter and Facebook feeds, doing broadcasts for the team's website and social media platforms and helping the Cardinals reach out to Hispanic fans.

Her favorite part of the job: "Being exposed to different people, different cultures and getting to understand the whole baseball culture. Every day is something new, and it can be exciting -- something you won't expect to happen."

Here is her story, in her words:

Taking a swing at baseball

Junior (who splits his time between Miami and the Dominican) would keep in touch with me and ask me about my career. He said, "Why don't you try major league baseball? There's always a need for women journalists, and you can kind of pave your way that way. I'm sure you could find a career path." So, I just started exploring. I thought, "Well, why not?" That's how I came on with Major League Baseball for two years.