Last Friday morning, the Miami Marlins, one of the thirty teams in Major League Baseball (MLB), made an announcement which rocketed across the airwaves of the sports media world with the magnitude of an earthquake recorded at 8.0 on the Richter scale.
Kim Ng had been appointed General Manager (GM) of the Miami Marlins, thus becoming the first woman to hold that title at the MLB level. The GM post for the four major men’s professional sport leagues in North America – baseball, football, hockey and basketball – had long been the bastion of the male species. The Marlins’ release had speculated that Ms Ng would be the first woman to serve as the GM of a men’s team in a major professional sport in North America, whereas, in fact, she is following in the footsteps of Jo-Anne Polak, who held the position for the Ottawa Rough Riders of the Canadian Football League, from 1989 to 1991.
So, who is Kim Ng and how did she manage to crack the membership code to the ‘Old Boys Club’? Ms Ng, an American, is a baseball lifer with a very impressive resume built on thirty years of major league experience, including 21 years in the front office. Ms Ng, who had to overcome the cultural, old-school knock of never having played at the major league level, learnt the game by playing stickball in the street, and was an outstanding shortstop (arguably the most athletic position in the field) on the University of Chicago’s softball team. Upon graduation in 1990, she served as an intern for the Chicago White Sox where she performed all manner of entry level duties including charting pitches and recording their speeds with a radar gun. Ms Ng worked her way up the organization, quickly becoming a full-time analyst and then the assistant director of baseball operations, representing the club at the volatile salary arbitration negotiations with players and their agents.
In 1998, at the age of 29, Ms Ng became the youngest person to be appointed to the position of assistant GM of an MLB franchise, when the New York Yankees named her as Brian Cashman’s assistant. During her four years with the pinstripes, the Yankees won three World Series rings under the very astute management of their then manager, the often underrated, Joe Torre. In 2002, Ms Ng joined the Los Angeles Dodgers, where she served as vice president and assistant GM until 2011. She joined the MLB League Office as the senior vice president of baseball operations, where she remained until Friday’s historic announcement. At MLB Ms Ng directed international baseball operations, working with the front offices of the major league clubs and many other baseball leagues and entities around the world.
Ms Ng’s name has been in the mix for a GM post for a very long time. The cover story of the 5th May 2003 edition of Sports Illustrated, featured the ‘101 Most Influential Minorities in Sports’. Ms Ng’s face was featured on the cover of the magazine along with 27 other influential individuals, including Tiger Woods, Kobe Bryant, Serena Williams and Lebron James. The, then weekly, periodical ranked, Ms Ng, who is of Asian descent, in the 38th slot and boldly predicted, “Write it down: Ng may become baseball’s first female GM.”
The fabled Sports Illustrated cover jinx appeared to have cast its spell on Ms Ng’s ambitions until last Friday’s historic announcement. She had interviewed for several GM vacancies in the last decade to no avail, as the Dodgers, the Philadelphia Phillies, the New York Mets, the San Francisco Giants, the Los Angeles Angels, the San Diego Padres and the Seattle Mariners all baulked at handing the reins of their franchises to a woman.
Following her appointment, Ms Ng admitted in a Zoom interview on Monday, “Yeah, there were times where I felt like the interview wasn’t maybe on the up-and-up,” as she responded to whether she felt that her previous interviews might have been window dressing for owners claiming to having considered a diverse candidate pool.
It took the courage of the current Marlins CEO, Derek Jeter, who was the Yankees shortstop during Ms Ng’s time in New York, to make the bold step of hiring her and making her a trailblazer in the mould of Jackie Robinson who broke baseball’s colour barrier in 1947.
As only the fifth GM in Marlins’ relatively short twenty-eight-year history, Ms Ng will have her work cut out for her. The Marlins, a small-market franchise, currently has the third lowest payroll at the major league. However, their pitching staff is the fifth youngest at the MLB level, and their farm system is highly ranked.
This is not an easy job and Ms Ng will have to work very hard at building and maintaining a winner in this tough environment. She is no doubt as capable as any other individual of accomplishing exactly that. Having smashed this particular glass ceiling, Ms Ng has paved the way for other women to follow. Hopefully, other sports teams will step up and take a page out of the Florida Marlins’ book.
