When the moment arrived — when a major league team finally hired a woman to run its baseball operations — Kim Ng found a fitting way to tell her mother and four younger sisters. She gathered them all outdoors, at a gazebo in Wanaque, N.J., where her mother lives, and took them back in time.

Ng played a video clip from 2000 on her iPad. On the screen, a young Derek Jeter, the star shortstop for the reigning world champion Yankees, presented Ng with an award from an organization for women in the business of sports. She was the Yankees’ assistant general manager at the time, and now, all these years later, the man in the video was giving her a chance at the top job with his own team.

As the video concluded, Ng told her family she would be moving to Miami.

“We’re scratching our heads and thinking, ‘What’s she talking about?’” Ng’s mother, Virginia Cagar, 73, said in a telephone interview. “And she said, ‘I’m going to be joining Derek Jeter and the Marlins.’”

The news, announced on Friday by the Miami Marlins, the team Jeter runs as chief executive and a part owner, had a seismic impact in sports. Never before had a woman ascended to the role of full-time general manager in any of the major men’s leagues in North America. After three decades as an executive with the Chicago White Sox, the Yankees, the Los Angeles Dodgers and Major League Baseball, Ng had finally broken through.

Source: New York Times

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