Ng’s hire isn’t end of fight, but good start
When a woman becomes the “first” to do anything, it’s always the triumphant end of something, too. When Kim Ng was named the first female general manager in Major League Baseball, she terminated once and for all the idea that sports leadership requires some tribal-magic inner maleness, some secret passcode acquired from having “played the game.” Henceforth, women execs won’t be seen as incursions but as deservedly promoted.
It’s hardly compensation for the whole lousy historical imbalance, the sexist exclusion, but it’s not small, either. Because it’s one more check mark off the list, one more chance to tell your eyerolling daughter that, when you said she could do anything, you weren’t feeding her a sugared lie.
Thirty years of patient observation — some salt, grit and a little dirt under her unpolished nails — that’s what it took for Ng to rise through the ranks in baseball. “Decades of determination,” as she said in a statement through the Marlins.
She started as an intern out of the University of Chicago, where she played softball. She worked her way up to a vice presidency in the MLB office, along the way doing long stints as an invaluable assistant GM for the Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Yankees. She helped eight teams to the playoffs while handling the inky tedium of player contracts, arbitration hearings and valuations, putting “dollar signs on the muscle.”
During that time, she seems to have found the sweet spot between statistics and unmeasurables, rightly realizing that data is only a gauge of past performance and doesn’t necessarily show you someone’s future, and how they might surprise you — until she herself became the surprising future.
And suddenly, “the impossible seemed inevitable in retrospect,” to steal a description from Condoleezza Rice.
Ng is such a long-familiar figure in baseball management circles that it tends to obscure the size of the barrier she has crossed. “When I got into this business, it seemed unlikely a woman would lead a major league team,” she said.
To get there, she had to step with care through all the tripwires of being a woman in a man’s world, winning trust for diplomacy while becoming sharply knowledgeable and testing assumptions. The Yankees’ Brian Cashman called her “indispensable” and praised her “vast experience and institutional knowledge along with a calm demeanor and amazing ability to connect with others.” Still, she had been passed over in four previous interviews for top jobs.
Until Friday, when the Marlins’ Derek Jeter, the first Black man to become a CEO of an MLB team, did what no other team in North American major men’s professional sports had done: hire a woman to run the entire organization. For the first time, all of the male pieces on the emerald chessboard of a field will be set by ... her.
So while it might be nice to think that “firsts” don’t matter as much as they used to for women, they still do. The simple reason is that when a woman enters a new executive-level, commanddecision office, she has not so much shattered a ceiling as picked a lock. When the once-locked door is open, she holds the key, allowing others to follow through.
“Nothing is more encouraging than seeing that a gate is open and that reaching a goal not only can, in theory, be done but that it has been done,” said Susan Hockfield, a neuroscientist who served as the first female president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 2004 to 2012. Sometimes we don’t even know how much that “first” matters until she becomes it. And that’s when we realize just how much it means that what Hockfield calls “the quiet oppression of ‘impossibility’ ” has been lifted.
Billie Jean King has put it more bluntly. When a woman becomes a “first” in a previously male-dominated field, “it gives everyone permission,” she says.
Permission granted.