On Kim Ng and Representation
Opinion: The Marlins have a new general manager. Her hiring should serve as an inspiration and a lesson at every level of baseball.
Back when I was playing high school baseball, there was a girl who oversaw our scorebook.
She was the only girl in our dugout, but she knew the game as well as anyone, and that was all that mattered. Better yet, she knew how to keep score better than any of us, and she probably paid more attention than most of the players, too. As far as I knew and saw, her role on the team was not met with any resistance and she wasn’t doing the job for career experience. Of course, that’s not always the case in such situations.
As The Athletic’s Lindsey Adler recently noted, those who aspire to work in but didn’t play upper levels of baseball, including but not limited to young women, may not find the game or its typical gatekeepers to be so welcoming at the local, high school and collegiate levels. In other words, the start of the pipeline for anyone with dreams of working for a big league team.
Keeping track of stats or getting involved with a team’s coaching or operations staff are easy ways to gain experience at a young age, but not for everyone. Whether it’s overt sexism or discrimination, lazy excuses like “the guys are too immature for you to be in the dugout,” or uncomfortable jokes and comments, the sports world can create all kinds of obstacles for anyone who is not a straight male.
Ideally, such barriers will become less common now that Kim Ng has shattered a glass ceiling in sports. She was hired to be the Marlins’ general manager on Friday, making her the first woman and second person of Asian descent to hold such a role in Major League Baseball. Ng is also believed to be the first woman named general manager by a men’s team playing in one of the major North American professional sports leagues.
A baseball lifer, Ng began her major league career as a White Sox intern in 1990. Eight years later, she became an assistant general manager with the Yankees, playing a part in the building of three championship teams. She took the same job with the Dodgers in 2001 and first interviewed to become a general manager in 2005 when Los Angeles had a vacancy. Ng’s name has come up frequently in GM searches since then, but she was passed over at least four times.
"There were times where I felt like the interview wasn't maybe on the up-and-up," Ng said Monday when asked about past chances at her introductory press conference.
Fifteen years after her first interview, Ng is as experienced as any first-time GM has ever been. In addition to her high-ranking front office roles, her 30-year career also includes time spent as a senior vice president of baseball operations for the league.
The sad truth is that Ng is overqualified for her new job. She had to work harder and pay more dues than most men in her position. That it took so long for a team to hire her deserves to be criticized as much as Ng’s trailblazing deserves recognition. It’s fantastic that Ng finally got the gig, but that it only happened now is an indictment on the major men’s sports leagues and our broader society.
Ng, while higher on the totem pole than any other woman in baseball, is not the only one in the game right now, nor is she the only one in a front office. There are also a number of women who cover the game as well as anyone. All of these women, regardless of their jobs, are still vastly outnumbered by their male colleagues, however.
We’re a long way from all things being equal, but it’s good to know that there are increasing examples of inspiration and representation in a sport that has had its fair share of problems with such things. To see women and Asian Americans celebrate Ng’s hiring was uplifting; read this piece by Adler, or this one by Marc Carig, or this one from the women on the Daily News’ sports staff. But it was also something many baseball people and fans, like myself, will never experience because they’ve never struggled to find their likeness in a team’s front office – or the rest of the world for that matter.
Others have not been able to see the same, but hopefully that continues to change moving forward.
“There's an adage, 'You can't be it if you can't see it,'” said Ng, who was inspired by Billie Jean King growing up. “Now you can see it.”
Gary Phillips is a reporter, writer and editor for hire. He has written for The Athletic, Sporting News, USA Today Sports, Bleacher Report and Yankees Magazine, among others. He can be reached at garyhphillips@outlook.com.