Florida Woman

Every Asian-American knows this expression:
don't mess with me (WSJ photo)

Kim Ng holds a number of firsts: in 2020 she became the first woman and the first person of East Asian descent to be a general manager of a major league baseball team. Her roster moves helped the Miami Marlins, who have a payroll of $105 million (#22 out of 30, the league average is $165 million), to make the playoffs this year.

Digression: both her parents are of Chinese descent, hence the "East Asian" qualifier. Farhan Zahdi, who is Pakistani-Canadian ("South Asian"), became general manager of the Dodgers in 2014.

Kim Ng upends another stereotype: despite her Asian upbringing and going to the famously quantitative University of Chicago, she eschews analytics in favor of a traditional approach:

The Marlins open the wild-card round against Philadelphia on Tuesday night with a team Ng designed by prioritizing old-school principles such as avoiding strikeouts and the pursuit of higher batting average—ideas that are far from cutting edge in today’s data-driven game...

The question for Ng and the Marlins is if this traditional approach still has a foothold in today’s game. Her tenure as general manager thus far has featured a contradiction: She’s a reluctant symbol of social progress in baseball, but her day-to-day work reflects reverence for another era.

Ng asserts that she is not “new school” nor “old school” in her mentality. She just wants to build a balanced roster, a philosophy that has fallen out of fashion as baseball executives increasingly seek to construct teams made up of extreme outliers.

The Giants didn't make the post-season, and I didn't intend to pay attention to the MLB playoffs. Now I have a rooting interest.