Marlins' pioneering GM Ng: 'Failure is not an option for me'

MIAMI (AP) — Every baseball general manager needs to win, especially the first female GM.

Kim Ng knows it. She spent years beating her head against sports’ glass ceiling, until the Miami Marlins hired her in October as general manager. At her introductory news conference, she said she felt as though a 10,000-pound weight had been lifted — from one shoulder to the other.

“Failure is not an option for me,” Ng says.

Derek Jeter knows it.

“I joke with Kim all the time,” says the Marlins' CEO, who hired Ng, “saying, ‘Only time will tell whether it was the right decision.’”

Billie Jean King knows it, too. The tennis Hall of Famer, herself a pioneering woman, applauds Ng but said the role comes with pressure.

“The toughest part for us is you know that if you don’t do a great job, you're going to get killed, and it hurts the others coming after you,” King says. “When you're the first, you don’t want to ever be the last — that’s what every woman thinks. I'm sure Jackie Robinson thought, ‘I don’t want to be the last Black guy.’”

In other words: Go Marlins. They open their season Thursday with a roster that carries a female executive's imprint, and it might just be their best team in more than a decade.

For Ng, so far so good. She left an executive position with Major League Baseball to join the Marlins, the long-downtrodden franchise on the upswing since Jeter’s ownership group took over in 2017. During the offseason, amid the constraints of the team's perennially tight budget, she signed veteran slugger Adam Duvall and swung deals to revamp the bullpen.

Now keeping score begins for the Boys of Summer — and for the first female GM in the four major North American professional sports leagues. She’s also a trailblazing Asian...

source https://www.chron.com/sports/article/Marlins-pioneering-GM-Ng-Failure-is-not-an-16064510.php