‘Don’t take a backseat to anybody’: Marlins GM Kim Ng’s drive to succeed comes from mom
Miami Marlins general manager Kim Ng has had many inspirations on her trailblazing path of a career in baseball.
But there’s one that is closest to Ng’s heart.
Her name is Virginia Cagar.
Ng simply calls her “Mom.”
Cagar, 75, is a mother of five who made her living as a banker, with her career starting at the height of the women’s liberation movement in the 1970s. She worked to make sure her children would be successful and tried to instill the best qualities in them.
“She was always trying to be the best for her family,” Ng, 54, said. “She’s driven, always trying to get better. That’s where I get a lot of it.”
The biggest piece of advice Ng received from Cagar: “Don’t take a backseat to anybody.”
Ng took it to heart and has used that mind set to get to where she is today — the highest-ranking woman in baseball operations among MLB’s 30 teams the first woman hired to a general manager position by any professional men’s sports team in North America’s major leagues.
“Having five girls, I always plotted into the girls’ heads that ‘You are just as good as anybody — maybe even better,’” Cagar said. “You keep on trying. Keep at it. Do not give up. You are terrific.”
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Cagar’s message to her children came from experience.
She recalled applying for a high school job in Indianapolis only for the principal to tell her “If I had a choice between you and a fella, I would pick the guy.”
After the family moved to the New York area (first Queens, then Long Island and then New Jersey), Cagar enrolled part-time at Baruch College while raising two daughters to work on her MBA because opportunities in business were “more level.”
Even then, she faced roadblocks.
“During that time,” Cagar said, “I had a counselor essentially making me feel that I really didn’t belong in school. I belonged at home.”
Ng came to understand her mother’s dedication.
“She wasn’t going to be limited in that way,” Ng said.
Neither was Ng, even if it meant going against the grain in a way that even surprised her mother.
Sports were Ng’s passion. She played tennis and softball in high school and continued her softball career at the University of Chicago, where she majored in public policy and wrote her senior thesis on Title IX. That ultimately extended to Ng getting involved in a career in baseball on the front office side. It began with an internship with the Chicago White Sox shortly after graduating in 1990.
Cagar, meanwhile, wanted Ng to pursue a more traditional career path at first.
“I think with most parents, it’s realizing they want what’s best for your kids,” Ng said. “You want them to do better than you did. For her, that meant being a doctor, a lawyer, something in business. She didn’t quite understand [my passion for baseball]. She thought this was like a continuation of my childhood. I wasn’t making a lot of money — working for virtually nothing or had the potential to some day. Those were things that concerned her about what I chose for my occupation. She thought it was a phase and that it would pass.”
While Cagar was hesitant about Ng’s career choice — to the point where she would send Ng weekly articles about pursuing her MBA and attempt to have her pivot elsewhere — mom still let her daughter pursue her career path.
After all, Cagar saw her oldest daughter had all the qualities to succeed.
When describing Ng in a phone interview, the adjectives and superlatives varied based on which way Cagar was viewing her daughter.
On Ng as an individual overall: “Very wise, very thoughtful, very fair, right to the point.”
On Ng as a daughter: “I see Kimmy as a very loving daughter who always thinks of me and cares for my welfare,” adding that Ng calls regularly “just to see how I am” and that she was appreciative of family and Christianity.
On Ng as a student and a decision-maker: “She would absorb what she was hearing and if she had to make a decision whether to go for this or that, she would analyze it first and then make a decision. It was never spur of the moment.”
Any uncertainties Cagar had about Ng’s career choice began to wane when Ng became the assistant general manager of the New York Yankees in 1998 at age 29 — becoming the youngest assistant general manager in MLB history.
“She saw it was paying off when I got that role,” Ng said. “We’re New Yorkers. The Yankees were my team as a kid, and so I think it was definitely the status of it, the prestige. She understood what baseball meant to me as a kid and this was, in some ways, the dream job. It sort of fulfilled what I had always loved as a kid.”
The rest of Ng’s career has been well established. She spent four years with the Yankees and then another decade as assistant general manager for the Los Angeles Dodgers and then nine as MLB’s senior vice president of baseball operations with hopes of eventually becoming a general manager or president of baseball operations of one of MLB’s 30 teams.
She had her share of interviews over the years, all of which came up empty until the Marlins hired her as general manager in 2020.
“So many of these interviews were window showings,” Cagar said. “That was very discouraging, from a mother’s point of view to see her go through this and for the owners and the executives of those teams not be serious. She was a twofer. I hate to say that. I was a twofer back when I was working. I’m really proud of her that she broke the glass ceiling by showing the world a woman can do it. ... She rightfully belongs in that class, and she should have been in that class much sooner than 2020.”
Ng didn’t take a backseat to anyone, just like her mom for all those years.
“It wasn’t easy, but she definitely made it work,” Ng said. “She was very, very consistent with us. She’s definitely different than a lot of moms. She let you make mistakes. We would always know right from wrong. ... Her belief was ‘You do what you want. I raised you in a good way.’”
This story was originally published May 14, 2023 at 7:00 AM.
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