ARLINGTON, Tex. — When Kim Ng was hired to lead the Miami Marlins in November 2020, it made national news. She was on “Today” and got a text message from former first lady Michelle Obama. The weight of being the first woman and the first person of East Asian descent to serve as general manager of an MLB team meant everything she did was a headline.
Women in the industry, and some outside of it, texted me at the time about the gravity of the moment — how it was about time, and why did it take so long, and would this open the door for more women in sports, particularly baseball?
Privately, we all hoped the most you can hope for when a woman from an underrepresented group enters a high-profile position in a male-dominated world: Please be good enough to keep your job.
But it was how that job ended that truly speaks volumes.
Kim Ng was a reluctant trailblazer. Now, she’s a certified badass.
There are only 30 MLB teams. Only 30 people who truly lead a baseball operations staff. And Ng —who declined her part of a mutual option for 2024— walked away the minute it was apparent she was no longer going to be one of them. She did it without (to our knowledge) another job in hand. She did it matter-of-factly, telling The Athletic’s Tyler Kepner that she and owner Bruce Sherman…
