A FEMALE GM IN MIAMI ONLY ADDS TO CHICAGO’S UNCOMMON SPORTS MISERY
Kim Ng stood on a New York field and called out baseball’s executives, yet here she is, the first female to run a team in North American sports history and leading the Miami Marlins to the postseason
You might have seen her, long past midnight in the New York rain, arguing the game should have proceeded. Her manager, Skip Schumaker, argued with Mets’ groundskeepers and said he’d help them. Look, kiddos: There have been dreadful events in Chicago sports, and a few dopes will say the current shambles are the ugliest, but nothing works in that testosterone-loaded buzzstorm than watching the Cubs eliminated by a woman.
Kim Ng is the first female to run a men’s team, as general manager, in the history of major North American sports.
And there she is, drawing fewer fans this year than only the Las Vegas-bound Athletics, leading the Miami Marlins to a wild-card postseason berth when it sure seemed Major League Baseball wanted the Cubs in the playoffs. Rob Manfred will ignore that because, hey, he’s the daunted commissioner and, oh, the Cubs were losing four straight this week in a history of through-the-guardrail crashes — 6-14 down the stretch. But in a season when MLB’s pitch clock lifted attendance to a 9.2 percent rise in ballparks, you think he and his broadcast executives want the Marlins in October instead of the Cubs of rare competitive yore?
“This is an amazing moment,” Ng told media as the Marlins celebrated Saturday night in Pittsburgh. “These guys deserve all the fun that they’re having right now, but there’s more work ahead and I think they know that. This team has exemplified heart. And I think that is the driver of this group.”
That’s why Ng was fighting, in the slog of Citi Field early Friday, asking why the Marlins couldn’t finish a game after taking a 2-1 lead in the top of the ninth inning against the Mets, the biggest salary wastes ever in sports. Schumaker flew into an angry confrontation with a tarp-crew member. Was Manfred even awake? Just before 1 a.m. or so, three hours after a covering was put on the field, the game was suspended. Wait, didn’t Manfred get rid of Game 163 tiebreakers upon adding a third wild-card team in each league? Now he was asking the Marlins, after a three-game series in Pittsburgh this weekend, to return to New York if necessary Monday to finish Game … What?
“Without getting into details, obviously this is an unfortunate incident right now,” Ng said as the suspension was announced. “I don’t really want to get into details at this point.”
What, the commissioner sucks? He didn’t anticipate lousy weather could hit a cold-weather city in late September? For the Marlins, of course, the chokehold didn’t end up mattering. Just as they handled the delay of a New York game earlier in the week, forcing a doubleheader for their messed-up pitching staff, they arrived in Pittsburgh past 4 a.m., started the game slowly Friday night … and finally scored four runs in the eighth inning for their 41st comeback victory, this while the Cubs were blowing another 10th-inning setback to the Milwaukee Brewers. The Marlins’ 33-13 record in one-run games is remarkable.
“Right before the inning, I was just telling them, ‘3-0 ain’t nothing to us, man. We’ve been doing this all year,’ ” star Jazz Chisholm Jr. said. “It just starts off with one guy getting on and we just come back as a team.”
A night later, the Marlins were celebrating their playoff success. “I feel like we’re just the biggest family in the world,” Chisholm said. “I feel like nobody is connected as us as a team. I feel like when someone gets going, everybody gets going. That’s the plan here. And we’re coming in together.”
Not bad for a team owner who wasn’t unhappy when Derek Jeter left as CEO — after he hired Ng in late 2020 — and has Miami’s first 162-game postseason berth since 2003, when they won it all. “This is 162 games here, and we’re not going away. Just fabulous,” said Bruce Sherman, he of the $91 million payroll.
“When you feel the champagne in your eyes, that means you won something,” said Schumaker, who never had been a manager when Ng named him last fall, replacing Don Mattingly. “Not many professions get to do this. That’s why I didn’t want them to wear the goggles because I want them to remember what the burn feels like.”
They’d been screwed, it seemed, but they overcame the wobbles on a field nonetheless. This as the Cubs were gagging, adding to the Bears’ miserable 0-3 start and the disgust of a 100-loss White Sox season when fans still don’t know if two women were injured by a gun fired inside Guaranteed Rate Field, though one wounded fan finally said she didn’t shoot. This would be the time to stop rooting for those teams, as I said frequently in my 17 years there. The franchises keep inventing new ways of breaking hearts.
“We didn’t win enough ballgames,” said manager David Ross, who hit the history-changing home run in Game 7 of the 2016 World Series. “I mean, we can point fingers and blame. We’ve got to look inward. It’s on each of us to grow this year. It doesn’t feel like it right now. … I’m the manager of this team. The blame should come on me first.”
Will it? Many fans would love to find a new manager. This is the same group, minus Theo Epstein, that jilted Joe Maddon after he won the Series. “There was obviously a lot that we can do better,” second baseman Nico Hoerner said.
“It sucks, man, that’s going to be a little bit of a sour note,” catcher Yan Gomes said. “It’s tough and we should be upset about it.”
Or president Jed Hoyer, who officially has lost a playoff race to Ng. He couldn’t believe the 2016 celebration has led to more brooding about past curses, including a right-field mistake last week by Seiya Suzuki. “Ultimately I would hope the real benefit of ‘16 is people believing good things can happen. The supernatural is not causing missed fly balls to Brant Brown and Seiya Suzuki,” Hoyer told the media. “What I learned in Boston and learned here is if the team is good enough and gets the breaks at the right moment, you can win and so can we. I don’t even think about that stuff. When I heard about (a Brown dropped fly ball in 1998), I kind of laughed. I was like, ‘Oh, man, I thought we graduated from that.’ Apparently not.”
Or the team announcers, Jon “Boog” Sciambi and Jim Deshaies, who weren’t thrilled a game in Atlanta was stopped so Braves superstar Ronald Acuna Jr. could celebrate the record feat of a 40-70 personal season. “We’re really stopping the game to do a highlight montage?” Sciambi asked.
“Can we get the base after the game? This is pretty absurd,” Deshaies said.
Meanwhile, Ng is preparing for a series — on the road for the fifth and sixth seeds in each league — for a best-of-three in the wild-card round. She will have her best player, All-Star Luis Arraez, who returned to record a pinch-hit single in the triumphant eighth Friday. It will be nice to have more fans in the seats, which wouldn’t happen much at LoanDepot Park, where the Marlins averaged only 14,355 this season, or 1,162,819. At least Ng and her first-year manager kept battling in New York.
“There was disagreement,” Schumaker said, “and I’ll just leave it at that.”
Should the game have been finished? “That was my idea, yes,” he said.
Said Josh Bell, whose batwork killed his former team, the Pirates: “It was pretty wild. I thought we could have played through from the get go, just with the importance of that game and that timing of everything.”
Now they celebrate. “I’m on a cloud,” Bell said. “I couldn’t be more proud of the guys. Couldn’t be happier to have this opportunity.”
It’s even better to be a small potato who wins in the end. In a season when the Mets, Yankees and Padres have destroyed the idea of spending for championships, how cool to see the Miami Marlins somehow thrive. “We’ve been living for six years with ‘Let’s go Mets’ in our stadium all the time,” Sherman said. “Mets didn’t finish. Yankees didn’t finish. San Diego didn’t finish. Payrolls three times ours, and look what we did.”
Through time, it should be known, Kim Ng had been passed over at least 10 times for GM gigs in the majors.
Where are those teams today?
###
Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.