Rosenthal: Even after Ng, questions persist about lack of diversity in executive hires

Pick the best person, people often say. Don’t make this about race. Easy to say, except for minority candidates who keep getting excluded.

The Marlins’ hiring of Kim Ng as general manager last month was an exception for a sport in which the vast majority of top baseball executives are White males. The move was celebrated not simply because Ng, 52, is the first woman and first East Asian American to lead a major-league organization, but also because she clearly is qualified.

Surely, she is not the only minority candidate who fits that description.

Theo Epstein and Jon Daniels became general managers at 28, Andrew Friedman at 30. Three new GMs, the Mets’ Jared Porter, Rangers’ Chris Young and Angels’ Perry Minasian, are getting their first cracks at 41, 41 and 40, respectively.

Were Epstein, Daniels and Friedman truly the most qualified when they got their first GM jobs? Are Porter, Young and Minasian more qualified than some veteran candidates? In each case, the answer might be “no,” but teams were willing to take a chance. With Epstein, Daniels and Friedman, they were rewarded with success on the field. Porter, Young and Minasian, all of whom are highly regarded, might prove just as successful.

The problem is that minority candidates hardly ever get the same types of breaks, and promises of good intentions and programs to promote diversity no longer are enough. Teams continue to fail to address the issue adequately, and Major League Baseball must consider trying other approaches. The issue, even after Ng’s hiring, continues to fester. Ng replaced a Black man, Michael Hill, who as president of baseball operations helped guide the Marlins through a coronavirus outbreak and earn their first postseason berth since 2003.

Earlier this year, the NFL expanded the Rooney rule to require teams to interview two minority candidates for head coaching vacancies rather than one. The current Selig rule in baseball requires clubs to interview at least one minority candidate for high-level positions, but the league can reaffirm its commitment to improving diversity by doubling the number to match the NFL’s requirement.

According to MLB, 40 percent of players on 2020 Opening Day rosters were from non-White backgrounds, and 7.5 percent were Black. The league currently has six minority managers (20 percent), and the percentage of top executives in baseball operations is even further out of line with the percentage of non-White players.

Ken Williams, the White Sox’s executive vice president, currently is the only Black executive with decision-making power in baseball operations. Giants general manager Farhan Zaidi is a Pakistani Canadian with American citizenship. Tigers GM Al Avila was born in Cuba.

Don’t make this about race? MLB, the league that helped boost civil rights by introducing Jackie Robinson as its first Black player in 1947, talks openly about the issue. Like many businesses across the U.S., including The Athletic, it is working to become more diverse at a time of increased sensitivity to racial inequality.

Since August, commissioner Rob Manfred has appointed two Black executives, chief baseball development officer Tony Reagins and chief people and culture officer Michele Meyer-Shipp, to senior leadership positions at the league office. The Royals recently announced that Karen Daniel, a Black business and civic leader in Kansas City, had joined their ownership group. But at the club executive level, the lack of minority representation remains glaring.

Williams said he told Manfred he had “given up” on the idea that front offices would improve their minority hiring. But after the events of this season — protests against inequality by players, coaches and managers; demonstrations of support for racial equality by Manfred and club executives; donations by owners to groups supporting Black rights — he started to grow optimistic again.

Now, even with Ng’s hiring, he’s not so sure whether club behavior will change.

“It’s a fight right now to continue to choose to be optimistic,” Williams said. “When you’re talking about the owners’ meetings, general managers’ meetings, farm directors’ meetings, the representation, the diversity, is not there.”

On June 10, Manfred spoke just before baseball’s amateur draft, live on MLB Network. He described systemic racism and inequality as “devastating” problems and delivered a message that executives from all 30 clubs reinforced from their remote locations, holding up signs that read: “Black Lives Matter. United For Change.”

“This moment is a call to action to acknowledge the ills that exist, to show solidarity with the Black community and its efforts to end racism and injustice,” Manfred said. “We want to utilize the platform afforded by our game to be not only allies, but active participants in social change.”

For baseball, executing that change is easier said than done. The ownership groups are overwhelmingly White. Minorities face institutional disadvantages, blocking their ascents to leadership positions. At the ground level, even the playing field can serve as an obstacle. Black athletes often get pigeonholed at certain positions — center field, for example — and pushed away from catcher, a leadership position. Catchers rarely become top executives, but they frequently become managers.

Manfred backed up his words to some extent by promoting Reagins and hiring Meyer-Shipp, but his influence over who clubs hire goes only so far. In a story published on Sept. 1, he told The Athletic’s Evan Drellich it was “unrealistic” to expect owners to transform their front offices as soon as this offseason. “That kind of change that we’re talking about … doesn’t come in one fell swoop,” Manfred said. “You got to just stay at them constantly, over a period of time.”

OK, but when does the waiting end?

Two Black men, Hill and Athletics assistant GM Billy Owens, have interviewed for multiple decision-making positions this offseason. Both were candidates with the Angels and Mets, and Hill also spoke with the Phillies before they named Dave Dombrowski president of baseball operations.

Dombrowski, 64, built World Series teams in three cities. New Mets president Sandy Alderson, 73, built them in two. Hill, 49, a top Marlins executive from 2007 to ’20, cannot match their accomplishments, but he is more experienced than Porter, Young and Minasian, while Owens has worked at a similar level.

Other minority candidates — including Pirates assistant GM Kevan Graves, a Black man who interviewed with the Pirates and Giants for GM jobs last offseason; Red Sox assistant GM Eddie Romero, a native of Puerto Rico; and Royals assistant GM Rene Francisco, a native of the Dominican Republic — are barely part of the conversation.

Two decision-making jobs remain open, GM positions with the Phillies under Dombrowski and the Cubs under Jed Hoyer. Williams bristles at the notion there are too few minority candidates, saying he sees no shortage of options when he attends functions for the Buck O’Neil Professional Baseball Scouts and Coaches Association, an organization featuring more than 100 members, mostly minorities.

Yet, Williams also sees a broader problem — a trend in the game in which clubs often prefer younger, less experienced executives to veterans with longer histories in the sport. Dombrowski and Alderson were exceptions, but only because they are so accomplished.

“Experience in scouting and player development and managing people somehow has turned into a negative,” said Williams, who joined the White Sox as a scout in 1992. “I have to say that because there are countless people, not just African Americans, that have put time in this game and have expertise in the various things I just mentioned, that aren’t getting a sniff. And people who have no experience in managing people, have no experience in player development or scouting, are put at the top of the list.

“Quite frankly, I don’t get it. The same group of owners — and I’m not afraid to say it at this stage of my career — would never consider hiring people that lacked that type of experience for their own companies that made them the millions that allowed them to buy these teams. Never consider it.”

When talking about minority candidates ascending to leadership positions, the buzzword among league officials is “pipeline.” Develop a pipeline of quality candidates, and eventually they will begin to populate dugouts and front offices throughout the game, or so the thinking goes.

In 2016, the league launched the Diversity Pipeline Program (DPP) to identify, develop and grow the pool of qualified minority and female candidates for on-field and baseball operations positions. Through four hiring cycles, the league says the DPP has assisted in more than 200 hires in baseball operations, coaching and training roles.

However, as Doug Glanville, a Black former major leaguer, wrote in The Athletic in October 2018, pipelines alone do not ensure change.

“… Someone has to have the power to ‘give’ you that chance,” Glanville said. “And what is merit but what a decision-maker decides it is? What is ‘qualified’ but what a decision-maker decides it is? We are not choosing a surgeon to perform a rare surgery; there is substantial subjectivity here.”

The NFL, a league in which roughly 75 percent of the players are African American, determined its pipeline was insufficient.

Last month, the league’s owners approved a new rule that will incentivize teams to develop minority candidates who leave for head coaching and top front-office positions with other clubs.

The idea is less controversial than the league’s initial plan to offer incentives to teams hiring minority candidates, which would have caused some people to question whether the person hired was truly deserving. But some still find it to be the wrong approach. Chris Williamson, a former Syracuse safety who now works for SNY, said on Twitter, “It’s not as insulting as the other proposal, but still it’s a bribe.”

Under the resolution, which is pending approval from the NFL players’ union, a team that loses a minority assistant coach who becomes a head coach or a minority executive who becomes a GM will receive third-round compensatory picks in each of the next two drafts. A team that loses two minority staffers to head coach and GM positions in the same cycle would get the pick in three straight years.

The expansion of the Rooney rule to mandate a greater number of interviews for minority candidates might be more relevant to baseball. But while MLB, because of its smaller percentage of minority players, faces perhaps less internal pressure than the NFL to adjust, one White executive said the NFL’s incentive plan is something baseball should consider, too.

“Given the reality of the industry’s track record, I like the concept of incentivizing teams to recruit and develop minorities in lower- and mid-level jobs, creating a bigger pool for the top jobs,” the executive said. “League-wide, the implicit bias to take the comfortable way out and hire those from similar backgrounds has proven too difficult to overcome without penalty or reverse incentive.”

MLB does not appear ready to embrace such a plan, but inside the commissioner’s office, too, there is a growing sense things at the club level must change.

“We have reached certain degrees of success with our established programs and initiatives, but it is imperative that we continue to be strategic in the way we improve diverse representation of ethnicities, races and genders in senior leadership roles across Baseball,” said Meyer-Shipp, the league’s new chief people and cultural officer.

“Representation matters, not only as a metric for holding our industry accountable, but also to ensure that our sport is reflective of the diverse demographics of our country, where our teams play, and our fans.”

Williams has heard it all before. He praised both Manfred and former commissioner Bud Selig for speaking about minority hiring with sincerity. But for all the talk, all the programs the league has put in place, progress is elusive.

“Some people have said, ‘Why don’t you say more?’” Williams said. “But I’ve said this for years and years and years. I don’t know how much more I can say. It’s the same thing every year.”

Williams paused.

“You can probably sense the frustration in my voice,” he said.

Enough talk. Time for action.

(Top photo of Ng: Joseph Guzy/Miami Marlins Handout Photo via USA Today)