Here’s the best, most comprehensive article on Kim Ng that you’d ever want to read. This comes from Yahoo!’s Tim Brown. He’s setting the stage for what should be a very interesting offseason relative to the hiring or non-hiring of Ng. The number of excuses has dwindled to almost zero (unless you simply think a woman shouldn’t be a GM) and it’s going to be fun to watch. I’m not of the mind that MLB must hire a female GM, but I am of the mind that if you’re qualified, you probably ought to be hired. Of course, things aren’t always so simple in MLB.

A handful of women have become major-league owners and team presidents, but no woman has risen to lead an organization’s day-to-day baseball operations, where, traditionally, the work of drafting, preparing, scouting and fielding ballplayers has been left to men, often enough – until only recently – men who played the game at the highest levels.

Rather, the baseball side of front offices has tended to mirror the demographic of their clubhouses, so handfuls of men pressed into small spaces doing what men do and talking about what men talk about in a sports culture, areas a former player and current team executive called, “the most male-dominated, narrow-minded, testosterone-filled, non-feminine-traits places in the world.”

In that arena, Ng, 5-foot-2 in flats, has survived and built her resume and reputation, and now she stands with the most capable of candidates among the next generation of baseball’s general managers.

From my own limited time working with an MLB team I can vouch for that second paragraph. I don’t know that the description above has to necessarily be a negative thing — well, until it prevents someone like Ng from getting a job.

She’s definitely got some powerful people coming out in favor of her:

“Dealing with her this winter, this spring and so far this summer, I’ve been impressed with how ready she’d be for something like that,” said Dodgers manager Joe Torre, who also worked with Ng in New York. “I hope to hell it happens. She’d be a ground breaker not only for baseball but for women.”

and

“It is a barrier, that’s fair to say,” commissioner Bud Selig said. “And I do think barriers are broken down, hopefully sooner rather than later.”

Selig’s daughter, Wendy Selig-Prieb, served for six years as CEO of the Milwaukee Brewers, the franchise Selig once owned.

and

DePodesta called her, “smart, tough and strong,” concluding of her GM aspirations, “Yes, she could handle it.” Evans hired her twice, once in Chicago and again in Los Angeles.

But of course there are obstacles. I’ve mentioned this incident before and will probably continue to do so in the future. My wife works in a completely male-dominated field and was one of three female applicants in a field of 400 candidates. She works as an engineer in what is essentially a factory. There weren’t even female bathrooms there when she started. I’d say she puts up with some sort of sexism on a weekly basis, so I’m sensitive to it. In fact, I despise this kind of shit.

Going on five years ago, Ng’s private journey – the work day of an assistant GM is a mostly anonymous one – became a national story. Bill Singer, a former big-league pitcher and at that time a special assistant to New York Mets GM Jim Duquette, stopped Ng during GM meetings in Phoenix. He asked her who she was. He asked her why she was there. He asked her about her heritage. Ng, recognizing the situation as potentially flammable, patiently answered his questions. He then mocked her in gibberish-speak that was supposed to approximate Chinese.

She calls it, “the Bill Singer incident.” She calls it the worst episode of sexism – not racism – she has experienced.

“I think that’s the ironic thing,” Ng says. “People match it up to race, and I think it was more about gender.”

And then the true irony….

After claiming he was disoriented by alcohol and the effects of a diet, and after meeting with Ng and Dodgers and Mets officials, Singer was fired. He currently works for the Washington Nationals as, yes, their coordinator of Pacific Rim operations.

The article also goes into detail of another possible female GM candidate, 23-year-old Helen Zelman, a baseball operations analyst for the Arizona Diamondbacks who has a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from MIT.

I think Ng will eventually be hired as a GM, and the Mariners would be more likely to do it than most other teams (the article details why). We’ll see.