Orioles Considering Ng for Open EVP Role

It’s a rite of fall by this point.

Every year after the season ends, underperforming teams start gutting their organizations. It often starts at the top, with the president, GM or the like being axed and a new power structure being sought after.

(Discuss this on the BSL boards here!)

And every single year, the name Kim Ng comes up as a candidate. It’s nearly without fail that the name comes up with every single opening. The earliest public reference appears to be an “also-ran” mention from a 2008 article in Baseball Prospectus’ top-10 list of GM prospects.

From 2009:

From early 2011:

From after 2011:

From 2014:

From 2015:

From 2016:

And if those were the shots, here’s the chaser — from Monday:

So who is this mysterious character?

Well, we’ve deliberately buried the lede: SHE is currently the senior vice president for baseball operations at MLB, the highest-ranking female executive in baseball and the daughter of parents of Chinese heritage.

What that has ultimately led to is a jackpot from an optics standpoint. The Selig Rule — an offshoot of the Rooney Rule from its NFL counterpart — mandates that teams interview minority candidates for every GM opening and provide that list to MLB.

To that end, Ng has become more or less a political pawn. She’s absolutely deserving of any potential opening. Twenty years ago she joined the New York Yankees front office as an assistant to Brian Cashman. She worked for the Los Angeles Dodgers as VP and assistant GM, and interviewed for the opening ultimately filled by Ned Colletti in 2005.

She joined MLB in 2011, and in the meantime has shown up every single year in GM searches with no success getting a job as a lead dog.

This can’t be merely a coincidence.

Sure, there’s something to be said about the Dave Martinez theory. That is, that finishing as a runner-up for many jobs year after year can make a job prospect somehow ‘tainted.’

That dynamic is in play right now with Sandy Alomar Jr. now with managerial openings, and happened quite frequently with then-Minnesota Vikings defensive coordinator Leslie Frazier when NFL jobs opened up.

And this is the downside of a rule that has its heart in the right place. Many of these jobs are handed out in what more or less amounts to the sports version of the Spoils System.

But the Orioles being interested in Ng doesn’t have to be just an optics thing. Not only would she be a ground-breaking hire, but she is clearly qualified to run an Orioles team heading into the pivotal stretch of a rebuild — the ground level.

Only the Angelos family knows their true intentions, but here’s a plea: please don’t do this as an optics ploy. If Ng is a serious candidate, that’s one thing, but don’t interview her and run her through the process again just for the sake of fulfilling a quota.

The fans deserve better.

The game deserves better.

Most importantly, she deserves better.