It is with Kim Ng, hired as general manager of the Miami Marlins, who spoke at a press conference populated by more media than the Marlins typically draw for a front office hire.
“For us, Robinson coming into baseball had this immediate political and social significance,” the late paleontologist and devout baseball fan Stephen Jay Gould said of Jackie Robinson’s debut in the major leagues. “So for me, I always saw it as a combination of social justice and damn good baseball.” So it is with Kim Ng, hired as general manager of the Miami Marlins, who spoke at a press conference populated (remotely, of course) by more media than the Marlins typically draw for a front office hire. Ng’s ascension to the job — somehow both novel, because of the barrier broken, and infuriatingly late, with her resume far greater than scores of men who have hold these jobs around baseball before her — means a great deal for the cause of women, for the progress of Major League Baseball, which will only benefit by the introduction of an underutilized source of talent. But what this means for the Miami Marlins is less understood, it seems. And it is worth remembering what followed Robinson’s joining the Dodgers. The breaking of the color barrier in Major League Baseball was led by Robinson, but many others quickly joined him as Blacks performing at a stellar level throughout Major League Baseball. Larry Doby followed in the American League with Cleveland, breaking the barrier in that circuit in July 1947. The Dodgers added Black players like Roy Campanella and Don Newcombe, but so, too, did the New York Giants with Monty Irvin, the Boston Braves with Sam Jethroe. The Dodgers, though, as Arthur Ashe put it, were Black America’s team. They are the ones who received the love and appreciation for being first. That mattered at the box office, too: the Dodgers drew more fans in 1947 than they had in any previous season, and remained at or near the top of the National League in fans drawn through the end of Robinson’s career in 1956. To a conglomeration of people who believed in the just cause, and appreciated the winning baseball provided by Robinson and his Hall of Fame production, this made for a connection that lasted through lifetimes, through generations. Contrast that with how people generally think of the Miami Marlins — that is to say, they aren’t often thought of at all. Fans don’t tend to show up with regularity in Miami, there’s almost no national profile for the Marlins, and the franchise is probably best known, in its first three decades, for winning in the playoffs, then quickly dismantling the rosters that did so, a Philadelphia Athletics for our time without a sympathetic front man like Connie Mack. But beyond the obviousness of the baseball value in hiring Ng, that the Marlins are the team first to do what should quickly become commonplace, the way it has once a single NBA team, the San Antonio Spurs, hired Becky Hammon as an assistant coach, the Marlins will be known for taking this step.
