REINSDORF CAN TRY ONE FINAL DEED FOR BASEBALL SOCIETY: HIRE KIM NG
How perfect that Ng, more than 30 years after the Chicago White Sox gave her a shot, is suddenly available for a dreadful owner to hire for a prominent executive role, which might help wake the man up
There is one matter left for Jerry Reinsdorf until he abandons humankind, thus allowing White Sox and Bulls fans to pray alone. For his wretched baseball club to move on in life, he should hire the best obtainable candidate to be his executive vice president. Kim Ng is a she, the first female general manager ever hired by a major sports team in North America.
Predictably, because the owner of the Miami Marlins is a buffoon, Ng became available Monday. Even though she hired a spritz of a manager in Skip Schumaker and made the National League playoffs — beating an enriched team like the Cubs and dumping the all-time-extravagant Mets and Padres — someone named Bruce Sherman says he wants to run operations his analytical way despite her masterful success and the second-lowest attendance figure in Major League Baseball. It’s a miracle the Marlins made the postseason, which had little to do with Sherman.
She should be MLB’s Executive of the Year, if this is handled properly. And if we consider one of Reinsdorf’s numerous flaws — in a Sox ownership role starting in 1981, a 43-year toilet hut in which he has been to one World Series and happened to win it in 2005 — he runs one of only three clubs that never has signed a $100 million free agent. If Ng was smart, maybe she’d wait for a better gig. Maybe Fox or ESPN will hire her as an analyst, a brilliant move. Perhaps she’ll take a No. 2 job with Steve Cohen’s Mets or a Red Sox team that fires a GM every few years.
But she also knows all about Reinsdorf, who handed her an initial break in the 1990s and let her serve as assistant director of baseball operations for two years. Those were the finest overall seasons of the Sox, with Frank Thomas and Robin Ventura, while her boss declared war on the MLB Players Association. She also knows he finally swept out two longstanding executives in Ken Williams and Rick Hahn and that his next flaw, new GM Chris Getz, recently turned 40. There is no one in the organization between 87-year-old Reinsdorf and a lad who could be his great-grandson.
If Ng wants to attempt something groundbreaking in the sport, trying to revive one of the forlorn franchises, she should take a job above Getz. Fans have about had it, not knowing if they’ll be shot by a handgun in the South Side ballpark. The Cubs, despite Ng’s triumph, have pieces in place and will remain firmly in control of the town’s allegiances. The Sox are one existing ballclub that could discuss moving to Nashville, as Reinsdorf already has done, and have us all applauding it might happen. No MLB team had a larger attendance drop to 2023, with a decrease of 4,194 per game or 339,731 total at Guaranteed Rate Field. Even the Oakland Athletics, off to Las Vegas, were up 44,450 from 2022.
Everyone who has worked with Ng says she has class. In explaining why she didn’t agree to a solo mutual option for 2024, which didn’t include a requisite multi-year contract from Sherman, she said, “In our discussions, it became apparent that we were not completely aligned on what that should look like and I felt it best to step away. I wish to express my sincere gratitude and appreciation to the Marlins family and its fans for my time in South Florida. This year was a great step forward for the organization, and I will miss working with Skip and his coaches, as well as all of the dedicated staff in baseball operations and throughout the front office. They are a very talented group and I wish them great success in the future.”
Perfect. At 54, Ng was in a high role with the New York Yankees — when they won three straight World Series — and with the Los Angeles Dodgers until 2011, when she became MLB’s senior vice president for baseball operations. Once she crossed over, with the help of former Marlins boss Derek Jeter, it was her way of saying hello to a gig that bypassed her in more than 10 interviews.
She greeted it, in only three years, with a sensational playoff berth. Her boss wasn’t impressed, demanding the credit for himself. She left. Great for her. Great for humankind.
Normally, I wouldn’t subject her to Reinsdorf. But he needs her and helped her 30 years ago, when hiring a woman in sports management was dreck. See it this way: The Sox couldn’t be any worse than they are now.
If she makes the playoffs in three years, build her a statue.
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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.