Kim Ng brought baseball hope when the Miami Marlins appointed her general manager of the team in November, making her the first woman and second person of Asian descent to run a major league baseball industry.
In a sport dominated by men – specifically at the top, by white men – Ng symbolized the potential for change. The civil unrest of last year took diversity into account in many industries across the country, and it looked as if baseball would be included.
The rest of Major League Baseball’s offseason stood Ng alone. Eight people have been promoted or appointed as the permanent president of baseball operations, chief baseball officer or general manager of a club – Sandy Alderson is back at the Mets, the Chicago Cubs have elevated Jed Hoyer, Dave Dombrowski has taken over the Philadelphia Phillies. All the tenants except one were a white man.
Ng is the only woman or colored person hired for 13 openings comparable to her.
“It’s hard for a leopard to change his place,” said Dave Stewart, a black American who has done almost everything in baseball: a 16-season Premier League pitcher, a broadcaster, a coach, a special assistant, an assistant general manager, a GM and now an agent.
“I’ve been singing this tune since the mid-80s as a player,” Stewart added later in the phone interview. “And when I became a manager and was bypassed for a job I was more than qualified for when I was in Toronto, I said it again in public – there’s a problem with baseball and racism. Whether they say it is racism or whether they say it is prejudice is still a problem. ”
Like other colored players around baseball, Stewart was not surprised by the overseas appointments this offseason. Their frustration stems from the continuing lack of opportunities, especially after companies across the United States undertook to tackle racial equality after the assassination of George Floyd while in police custody in Minneapolis in May.
Only four heads of club baseball operations are identified as non-white by MLB’s diversity goals – about 13 percent of MLB’s 30 teams. They are Kenny Williams, who is Black, of the Chicago White Sox; Farhan Zaidi, who is of Asian descent, from the San Francisco Giants; Al Avila, who is Latino, of the Detroit Tigers; and Ng. This is a stark contrast to the demographics on the field, where 40 percent of the players in the biggest league are identified by MLB as non-white, most of whom are Latino.
“It weighs me down and it’s something I want to rectify,” Neil Leibman said. He recently took over the chairmanship of the committee for diversity, equity and inclusion of MLB, which consists of team owners and league officials. Leibman, who is white, is the chairman of the Texas Rangers’ ownership committee and the club’s chief operating officer.
As ML Man Commissioner Rob Manfred said and Leibman recently reiterated, clubs make their own choices about their hire for baseball operations president or general manager. Although MLB has resources, programs and a database of candidates to help improve its diversity, the only requirement for top baseball positions is the Selig rule.
The rule, first proposed by former commissioner Bud Selig in 1999, requires clubs to consider minority candidates for openings in five top-tier positions, including general manager and manager.
But in the two decades since the rule’s inception, owners have mostly hired top executives who look like them, and the number of non-white heads of baseball operations and field managers has not changed much. (In the 2021 season, there will be only six color managers – about 20 percent, who do not agree with the MLB player pool and the country.) Over the years, several candidates with diverse racial backgrounds – including Ng – have said they feel like their job interviews are simply taking place so teams can tick a box.
‘This story – or fairy tale or whatever you want to call it – you sell to make minorities think you actually have a chance, we should still strive to get the job, but for decades now – now for decades – it just did not happen, ”says Stewart, who also points to the lack of diversity among owners as a contributing factor. Arte Moreno, a Latino, is the sole non-white majority team owner in MLB
One of the ideas to correct the imbalance in the front offices is to update the Blessed Rule. Michele Meyer-Shipp – who was appointed by Manfred last summer to serve as chief and cultural officer of MLB – and Leibman both said in interviews that they were reviewing the rule with Manfred’s blessing. Everyone said they’re looking at what other leagues have done, and will make a recommendation to Manfred. “We are not only going to look at expanding it, but also at putting more teeth into it,” said Leibman, who as chairman has increased the frequency of diversity committee meetings.
Meyer-Shipp and Leibman declined to discuss specific changes because they said the process was continuing. Meyer-Shipp said she has been studying the practice of MLB and its teams since it began in October, and that divergent rental policies like these can include not only fines but also rewards. Leibman said the mandate could perhaps be extended to clubs, beyond a handful of top-tier films, and into Minor League Baseball, which will soon be run by MLB after years of independent operation.
“It’s easy to set a rule that says, ‘As part of your job performance, you have to interview at least one minority candidate,'” Leibman said. “It is no longer acceptable. You need to interview candidates who come from us, and you need to not only vet them, but also have the mindset to diversify baseball. ‘
In the NFL, where there is a greater difference between demographics on and off the field, league officials updated their version of the Blessed Rule, the Rooney Rule, last year, which increased the requirement for teams to be at least one off the field. non-white candidate interviewed. at least two for vacancies for head coaching. Recently, it added draft compensation for teams losing non-white staff members as head coaches or top positions elsewhere. Leibman and Meyer-Shipp said they hope Meyer-Shipp’s long CV outside of baseball – she was hired by accounting giant KPMG – would bring a new set of ideas to a long case.
“I was really very excited about Kim Ng and I really thought that her appointment, since it was the historic rent, would make me incredibly optimistic,” Meyer-Shipp said. ‘As for the fact that we still had a majority of white men in the roles, that’s what it was. So it was not like I was, ‘Oh my God, how did this happen?’ or “Oh my God, it’s so awful.” This is what it was and why I think the recognition is that we need to do work. We need to think about how we can do things differently. We need to think about how we can do things differently. ”
Meyer-Shipp and Leibman also pointed out that they had improved the footprints of team officials who had long been excluded from leadership roles before holding a leading title for baseball operations. Meyer-Shipp said she is studying the careers of general managers and looking for ways to help candidates who can diversify the game. She also said she hopes to add MLB’s existing programs to help remove barriers to access to the sport. Baseball can be an expensive sport for families, and many team officials first broke into the industry and worked for little money, or not at all.
Leibman – whose team in December appointed Chris Young, who is white, a former Rangers pitcher and a top MLB CEO, as its first GM, said baseball should do more to make a more diverse build talent pool from the bottom up (like more urban youth academies). He suggested it would lead to more players of color (only 8 percent of current major league players are black), and then more coaches and then more managers.
“The commissioner’s accusation of mine is that we must first concentrate – and I fully agree with this approach – to get diversity on the field,” Leibman said. “And with diversity on the field, we will make more people watch baseball. If you do not watch baseball, and they do not like baseball and do not play it, they will not be interested in applying for a job in MLB. They will be more interested in applying for a job at the NBA or NFL or another company. ”
There are already promising candidates who did not get the chance to manage a team. Two black assistant general managers – Kevan Graves with the Pittsburgh Pirates and Billy Owens at the Oakland Athletics – conducted interviews for several GM openings. Eddie Romero of the Boston Red Sox, Rene Francisco of the Kansas City Royals and Moises Rodriguez of the St. Louis Cardinals are notable assistant general managers of Latino. More women are joining coaching staff and front offices.
Stewart, meanwhile, said he continued to look at how candidates with less or no experience in the office get jobs before. He has not been interviewed for a GM vacancy since being sacked in 2016 after two years as the Arizona Diamondbacks GM (Arizona was 148-176 while managing the team.) He was amazed at why Ng’s predecessor, Michael Hill, who was Black and was the Marlins’ president or general manager for 12 years, did not lead a team again.
After all, it was the same industry, Stewart said, in which Ng did not get the reins of a team until she worked with MLB, the Los Angeles Dodgers, the White Sox and the Yankees for three decades. She had more experience than other executives who “were fired and re-employed and fired again.”