Marlins’ pioneer: Failure not an option

MIAMI — Every baseball general manager needs to win, especially the first female one.

Kim Ng knows it. She spent years beating her head against sports’ glass ceiling, until the Miami Marlins hired her in October as general manager. At her introductory news conference, she said she felt as though a 10,000-pound weight had been lifted

— from one shoulder to the other.

“Failure is not an option for me,” Ng said.

Derek Jeter knows it.

“I joke with Kim all the time,” said the Marlins’ CEO, who hired Ng, “saying, ‘Only time will tell whether it was the right decision.’ ”

Billie Jean King knows it, too. The tennis Hall of Famer, herself a pioneering woman, applauds Ng but said the role comes with pressure.

“The toughest part for us is you know that if you don’t do a great job, you’re going to get killed, and it hurts the others coming after you,” King said. “When you’re the first, you don’t want to ever be the last — that’s what every woman thinks. I’m sure Jackie Robinson thought, ‘I don’t want to be the last Black guy.’ ”

The Marlins open their season Thursday with a roster that carries a female executive’s imprint, and it might just be their best team in more than a decade.

Ng left an executive position with Major League Baseball to join the Marlins, the long-downtrodden franchise on the upswing since Jeter’s ownership group took over in 2017. During the offseason, amid the constraints of the team’s perennially tight budget, she signed veteran slugger Adam Duvall and swung deals to revamp the bullpen.

Ng (pronounced Ang) entered baseball as a Chicago White Sox intern in 1990. She won three World Series rings while spending 21 years in the front offices of the White Sox, Yankees and Dodgers, and spent the past nine years with MLB as a senior vice president.

Jeter, baseball’s first Black CEO, reached out to her regarding the Miami job.

“All she needed was an opportunity,” said Jeter, who played with the Yankees when Ng worked for them. “Everyone talked about how historic it was, but I didn’t make this decision to be historic. I made this decision because it was the best decision for the organization.”

After being hired, Ng said she had been turned down for a similar job by at least five other teams over the past 15 years.

“I’ve had to definitely win people’s respect, and that is a constant battle,” Ng said. “The job is hard enough, right? So when you put that on top of it, at time it’s a drag. It’s aggravating. What brings you back to neutral is you either deal with it or you go home, and I’ve never wanted to go home.”

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