Last week, the glass ceiling was shattered by a baseball. The Miami Marlins announced they would be hiring Kim Ng as their general manager, making her the first woman in men’s professional sports to hold the title. The decision was showered with praise across the sports world (including congratulations from Michelle Obama), as it’s a move that some may have never seen coming and simultaneously, one which is long overdue.
Forget that she was a woman for a moment and just look at how impressive her resume is: she was the youngest person to ever present an MLB salary arbitration case, which she did for the Chicago White Sox in 1995. Ng was also the youngest person to ever be hired as an Assistant GM by the New York Yankees in 1998. She won three World Series with the Yankees from 1998-2000 and after leaving the Yankees, became Vice-President and Assistant GM of the Los Angeles Dodgers from 2002-2011. Later, she became MLB Senior Vice-President of Baseball Operations from 2011-2020.
How can you reasonably turn someone with this kind of experience down? She wasn’t just over-qualified for the position, she was so far beyond the point of being qualified that it was impossible to argue against her as a valid candidate, impossible to deny her of one of the 30 opening GM spots in MLB. And that is why this isn’t the totally heartwarming story it appears to be.
Let’s not give too much credit to MLB. In this situation, they’re the manager that finally brought the correct pitcher in to get them out of a jam, but it only came after countless previous mistakes. Ng’s accomplishments had been ignored for years by the owners of thirty other baseball teams, until Derek Jeter, a Hall-of-Fame player turned part-owner.
The fact someone as accomplished as Kim Ng would still be viewed as an “outside the box” selection for a GM position simply because she’s a woman is kind of ridiculous. It’s also hypocritical from a baseball perspective when you consider the movement teams have made to sabermetrics in order to assemble the best team based on merit and qualifications, and begin to ignore the more traditional intangibles you look for in players.
Jeter, as much as I may resent how he had run the Miami Marlins up to this point, did the right thing here. He knew Ng dating back to his days as a Yankee when their careers overlapped and that likely helped put her over the edge. But he’s not the one who deserves the credit at the end of the day.
Ng has preserved and continued to excel over the 30 years she’s been in the game of baseball to the point there was just no way a team could turn her down anymore. In 2003, Sports Illustrated ranked Ng at No. 38 of the “101 Most Influential Minorities in Sports”, stating that she may become baseball’s first female GM. Ng still had to wait seventeen more years for the opportunity. What she has done to this point in her career is incredible and if she’s given a reasonable opportunity to succeed, she will inspire a generation of women to strive for and thrive in such high-ranking positions in the traditionally male-dominated sports world. It’s just that those women shouldn’t have to go above the glass ceiling like Kim Ng did in order to break through it.