What Kim Ng And Jackie Robinson Really Have In Common

This isn’t about the election. Isn’t that a relief? It’s almost like things used to be, before everything became surreality television and we had the energy to think about other things. It seems so long ago that we once had hobbies and concerns that weren’t life or death. But here we are, at least for a moment, and I’m going to take full advantage of it by talking about two subjects near and dear to my heart: diversity in hiring and promotion and baseball (fun fact, one of my college jobs was working as an usherette for the Toronto Blue Jays four summers in a row).

I have, of necessity, spent much of this year talking about the ways that politics and the pandemic have been squeezing women out of hard-won jobs and foisted upon millions of us more domestic worries than we’d ever had to manage. But for once, there’s some good news: the hiring of Kim Ng as general manager for the Miami Marlins, south Florida’s MLB team.