Will Kim Ng be MLB's first female GM?

[Algernon Moncrieff]

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As the senior vice president of baseball operations for Major League Baseball, Kim Ng lives and breathes sports, which is immediately clear when you walk into her window office at MLB headquarters in New York. There's a baseball glove, of course. (At 46, she still plays co-rec softball in Central Park.) And a bicycle helmet. (She occasionally commutes by bike.) And even a fishing pole. (She once caught a shark off Long Island.)

But the piece of sporting equipment that might have helped tee off Ng's career is her golf club. Former White Sox and Dodgers general manager Dan Evans, one of Ng's mentors, recalls a particularly revealing round she played a few weeks into her first job in baseball in the early 1990s. It was during spring training and White Sox staffers were picking teams during a golf outing. Ng, as she has been many times throughout her career, was the only woman in the group.

"She was drafted by a member of our field staff. The other guys all laughed and said, 'Oh, we don't even know this girl,'" Evans recalls. "I was thinking, 'I know she can play golf. She wouldn't hit from the women's tee. She only wanted to hit from the men's tee. And she held her own and played very well.

"A lot of people went, 'Whoahhhh!'"

Ng has made plenty of other people sit up and take notice in the two decades since. Now the highest-ranking woman in baseball, she was the second woman to be hired an assistant general manager, first with the Yankees and later with the Dodgers. And she aspires to become a general manager, which would make her the first female to run the on-field operations of a major pro sports team.

[hifiguy]

1. Why not?

These days stats nerds come in both genders and GMs these days are supreme stats nerds.