Grace Guerrero Zwit never had any intention of working in baseball. But while she was working at the Chicago Board of Trade in the early 1980s, she was approached by a colleague who was a friend of then-White Sox general manager Roland Hemond. Zwit happened to have a skill the White Sox organization lacked: she could speak Spanish.
Advertisement
Zwit joined the organization in 1982 under Hemond and Dave Dombrowski as an assistant in the player development and scouting departments, where she quickly learned the “guts” of the game.
Despite growing up on the South Side with a White Sox-loving family, Zwit was unaware of the intricacies of organized baseball, like the existence of the minor leagues. She learned quickly and since 2008, she’s worked as the club’s senior director of minor league operations.
Mostly, she’s responsible for the paperwork that surrounds the signing and trading of players, roster moves, budgets, immigration and rehab assignments.
For most of her career, Zwit has been the only woman in the baseball operations department. Kim Ng, currently the senior vice president of baseball operations for Major League Baseball, joined the White Sox as an intern in 1990 and stayed with the organization for six years. But in the White Sox’s relatively small front office, Zwit rarely noticed or cared about being outnumbered.
“Years ago, when females were just getting into it, it was going to industry meetings, that’s where it kind of stands out,” Zwit said. “I mean, hundreds of men, and there might be four females in the room. That’s where you really notice it. Here in the office, in the department, I don’t notice it at all.”
Oddly enough, some would get confused when she left her husband and two sons to go to spring training every year.
“People would be like, ‘Well who’s watching your kids?’” she said. “And I’d say, ‘Well, their father.’ Their father has them, and my boys didn’t know any different…people were just amazed that I could pick up and leave for six weeks when I had two kids at home.”
But now, Zwit has company again in baseball operations in Emily Blady, a baseball operations analyst who was hired by the Sox in January. She’s the first woman since Ng to join the baseball operations department.
Blady, 24, is part of a new generation of women in baseball.
For Ella Cahill, an amateur scouting assistant with the Cubs, her future profession came into focus at an early age.
She not only enjoyed baseball growing up in Charleston, S.C., she had a growing curiosity about it.
“It was one of those things, like, the more I watched it, the more I wanted to know about it,” she said. “So it was like every answer I got, I kind of, it opened up a few different lines of like, ‘Oh, well I’m curious about this now,’ and ‘Oh, that makes me think about this.’”
Advertisement
When it was time to get her first summer job, Cahill was hired as a game day worker with the Charleston RiverDogs, the Single-A affiliate of the New York Yankees. Her main responsibility was checking IDs, but the opportunity proved prophetic.
“From my first night, I just, it sounds so cliche, I know, but I just kind of knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life at a baseball field and around the game,” she said. “And it really was just kind of a gut, I just knew it. And after that, it was just sort of following that, however I could.”
So Cahill, with her mind set on baseball, went to the College of William & Mary, and ended up interning in multiple positions for the RiverDogs, eventually spending a summer in New York interning in the Yankees’ corporate sponsorships department.
One week after she graduated in 2015, Cahill joined the Cubs in a business capacity, though she knew she eventually wanted to break into baseball operations. After speaking with people in the baseball operations department, Cahill realized that she was lacking in the tangible experience that was required for an entry-level job in baseball operations.
Cahill knew it was time to take a leap of faith, so in early 2016, she left the Cubs and moved out to Arizona, where she had no job lined up and few contacts. It was a difficult but necessary decision.
“I just knew I had to do it,” she said. “To me it absolutely made sense as kind of the step that I should take, if I wanted a job in baseball operations. And I absolutely believed in myself, I mean, because I kind of had to, right? I just really, really believed that if I got out there, I would be able to kind of build experiences, and find a way to get onto the baseball operations side.”
For six weeks during spring training, Cahill went to as many games and met as many people as she could, trying to fill those gaps in her resume.
“I went to junior college and college games, and tried to just write what I thought about players, which I think can be kind of hard to do,” she said. “Because it’s not going to be perfect when you’re trying to do it, especially when you’re starting out. But just trying to write what I thought about players and kind of writing what I saw. So with that it was pitch recognition, kind of some of the more technical aspects of baseball, I guess. So it was just different skills, and a lot of it honestly for me came just from watching a lot of baseball, day in and day out. That was kind of like you just pick up on a lot of that stuff, rather than something that I could go down and say, OK, by this time I will have learned X, Y, Z.”
Advertisement
That work paid off when the Cubs hired Cahill back as a video intern for extended spring training in 2016.
Later that summer, Cahill became a player development trainee for the organization, mostly working in Arizona throughout fall league and instructional league, before being promoted to her current position in early 2017. Working out of the Cubs’ Wrigley Field office, Cahill supports the amateur scouting staff and handles the flow of information. She also has the opportunity to go out and evaluate players from time to time.
Cahill is the first woman to do amateur player evaluation for the Cubs since Theo Epstein took over in 2012, and the only woman currently working in baseball operations aside from Epstein and Jed Hoyer’s executive assistant, Meghan Jones.
But Cahill says she doesn’t pay much mind to the gender disparity with the Cubs or when she’s out scouting games.
“To be honest with you, I just sort of see this as this is my day-to-day, this is my work environment, I don’t really think of it as being the only woman in the room,” she said. “It’s just, I’m the scouting assistant and these are my colleagues, my peers, my mentors, my role models kind of, both internally and when I’m at games.”
Like Cahill, Blady can pinpoint the exact moment she fell in love with baseball.
Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter was running toward foul territory in short left field, tracking a Trot Nixon pop-up, which he caught just before he dove into the stands, emerging scratched and bloodied en route to a 5-4 win over the Red Sox in 13 innings. “The Dive,” as it came to be known, on July 1, 2004, sealed the deal for Blady, who, despite growing up in Long Island, N.Y., wasn’t a big baseball fan up until that point.
“I was sold,” she said. “That was it. It became my passion, it became something I was thinking about every day. I couldn’t miss games, it became life, you know?”
Advertisement
Still, it would be a while before Blady thought of baseball as a viable career option. She majored in applied mathematics at Barnard College, where she teamed up with the university president to help establish a computer science department. Through her college network, she met someone who was interning for the Yankees and realized that a job in baseball was attainable.
Before her senior year, Blady worked to beef up her resume, honing her coding skills and reading everything she could about the game. Then in 2016, she landed a baseball operations and analytics internship in Detroit, where she worked on building out the Tigers’ scouting and statistics database, dubbed Caesar (a nod to the Ilitch family, which owns Little Caesar Enterprises).
It was Blady’s first foray into Major League Baseball, and as the only woman in the Tigers’ baseball operations department at the time, there was an intimidation factor.
“So I was coming out of Barnard College when I first started work with the Tigers,” she said. “And Barnard is Columbia’s sister school, it’s all women, so you know you come out of it, it’s a big feminist school, right, everyone’s always talking about feminist issues, and I’m surrounded by women all the time in all of my classes.
“And then my second week on the job with the Tigers, three weeks after I graduated college, we had the draft, and I remember sitting in that room, in the back, kind of in the corner, and they had all their area scouts there, all these really big guys, and coming into it, I was like, you know, feminist, nothing can make me feel weird or uncomfortable, I got this. And then I was in that room, and I realized that everyone there had like a solid foot on me, height-wise, and then it hit me, I was like, oh…I know that there’s no difference between me and these other people in terms of what I can do on an intellectual level, a professional level, in baseball. It was just striking that all these men were so much bigger than me. But since then I’ve kind of gotten used to that. It doesn’t make me feel uncomfortable, it’s just really only strengthened me, to know that it doesn’t matter.”
She left Detroit for an internship with the Nationals in research and development in 2017. In Washington, Blady worked on special projects, often requests through a coach or someone in the front office.
She expects her role with the White Sox to be a healthy mix of both experiences, and is excited by the challenge of working for a rebuilding team.
Advertisement
“A big part of being in baseball for me, a part of my motivation, is I want to help build a winning team,” Blady said. “When I was in Washington, I got there and the team was already winning. Which is satisfying, but not as much as I wanted to be. Here, I have a chance to help build that. I have a chance to contribute to the success. So hopefully, in a few years down the line, when the White Sox win the World Series, we’ll all get the rings, and I’ll say, you know, yeah, I was a real part of this. And that’s what I want, I want to really contribute to the success. I want to contribute to the team playing and I want to help make that happen here.”
You can’t talk about women in baseball without discussing the prospect of the first female general manager, and you can’t talk about the first female general manager without talking to Kim Ng.
Ng’s baseball roots can be traced back to Chicago — she attended the University of Chicago, where she played softball, served as sports editor for the newspaper and yearbook, and was president of the women’s athletic association. She also wrote her B.A. paper on Title IX. After graduation, one of Ng’s coaches told her the White Sox were looking for an intern, so she immediately printed out her resume, got it to the White Sox and was hired. Ng did research for arbitration cases, the Rule 5 draft and trades before being hired as a special projects analyst.
With the White Sox, Ng found plenty of work and valuable experience, as well as an ally in Zwit.
“I think I was too young for it to seem daunting,” Ng said. “I think when we’re young, we’re just so brave and aggressive and really, you know, a lot of us are. So I just probably didn’t know any better. And it was great having Grace in baseball operations…because I didn’t know much different. And so she was definitely somebody that I looked to and I saw the way she handled herself, and she stuck up for herself, and she was really honest with people, and gave them her opinions, her perspective. And I think for me, that was really empowering, to see someone just be themselves. And not in any way be intimidated.”
After leaving the White Sox in 1997 as the assistant to the director of baseball operations, Ng went to work for MLB at the American League office before being hired by Brian Cashman as the Yankees’ assistant general manager in 1998. She left to take the same position with the Dodgers in 2002 under Dan Evans, whom she worked with in Chicago, before leaving for the league office in 2011.
There have been two other female assistant general managers — the Red Sox’s Elaine Weddington Steward was the first in 1990 and Jean Afterman succeeded Ng with the Yankees in 2001 after serving as one of Hideki Irabu’s agents.
Advertisement
Ng has come the closest to breaking baseball’s glass ceiling.
Ng first interviewed for a general manager job in 2005 (with the Dodgers), and has interviewed six other times, including for the Angels, Mariners and twice for the Padres (she lost out to Jed Hoyer in 2009).
While she said there’s a certain amount of pressure that comes with others’ expectations of her — “Every time I don’t get that job, I feel like somehow I’ve failed an entire 51 percent…you take it hard,” she said. — Ng believes it’s only a matter of time until a woman is hired as a general manager.
So what will it take?
“I think it’s going to take a courageous or blind owner,” Ng said.
She was kidding. Kind of.
“Listen, I think on the ownership side, anybody that you turn your club over to, you want that person to be qualified, and forward thinking, and there’s this list of criteria that they all have,” she said. “But I think…they’re turning over their multi-million dollar assets, and you just want to make sure that you have the right person.
“And so I do think that there’s definitely a pressure there, not only because of that reason, but also to then be the person that’s going to go against the grain, think outside of what is conventional, you know, you sort of understand why it’s been like this for a long time. However, it doesn’t mean that it should stay like that, and it will take someone who, like I said, has got some courage to break out of that.”
Ng isn’t sure when that courageous or blind owner will come along. She once believed a female general manager would’ve been hired by now, whether it was her or someone else.
She believes the onus lies more on the open-mindedness of the GM to hire women, as opposed to ownership.
“It is 2018, you know, these guys, their mothers were probably working,” she said of today’s general managers. “And there’s just no reason why, in this day and age, that it should be as infrequent as it is. I think it’s more the GM level, and assistant GM level, farm director, scouting director level.”
Zwit, Blady and Cahill all said they believe a woman will be GM at some point. Cahill wouldn’t say that’s her goal, but she knows she wants to spend her life in baseball. Blady echoed the latter sentiment.
Both women were reluctant to even speak for this story, each afraid it would provide an unnecessary focus on them.
Advertisement
But when I asked Blady whether she wants to be a general manager, she gave me the same answer she said she gives anyone who asks her whether she wants to be the first one.
“No, I want to be the third or fourth,” she said. “Because what kind of feminist are you if you don’t root for your sisters? And I know that now I have a lot of peers. I know that I was recently hired here with the White Sox full time and I know that a few other women were hired around baseball as well. So I’m hoping that, from all of us, that we’ll make a name for ourselves, and hopefully one of my peers or myself will kind of get to that level.”
Because there are no female coaches in Major League Baseball, many women lack the player development background some owners might look for in a potential general manager.
While there are few full-time female scouts in the game, they’re not unheard of — the first known female scout was Bessie Largent, who, along with her husband, Roy, signed over 150 players for the White Sox from 1925-1943, including Hall of Famer Luke Appling, according to SABR. There was also Edith Houghton, who was hired by the Phillies in 1946. But since then, it appears there were no other full-time female scouts until the Seattle Mariners hired Amanda Hopkins in 2015. Cahill said she’s run into other female scouts at games before, though some are part-time.
Ng said there are a couple female scouts at the commissioner’s office with the Major League Baseball Scouting Bureau, including Ila Borders, the first woman to earn a college scholarship for men’s baseball (Division III Whittier College), and Robin Wallace, who also played baseball for a year at the University of the South.
But many women are proving you don’t need on-field experience to work in baseball, and are breaking into the game as Blady and Cahill have, through baseball operations. The Miami Marlins recently hired pro scouting assistant Alexandria Rigoli, the first woman to work in the organization’s baseball operations department. This winter, the St. Louis Cardinals hired Emily Wiebe as a baseball operations analyst, the Phillies hired Dana Parks as a player development coordinator, and the Los Angeles Dodgers have Megan Schroeder and Emilee Fragapane in research and development.
Cahill is proof that the kind of experience many major league teams are searching for today goes well beyond just experience on the field.
Advertisement
“From my perspective, I’ve done everything I can to improve as an evaluator and learn,” she said. “And really, all it took was one team, the Cubs, taking a chance on me and deciding that I was qualified for the position. I think at the end of the day I’m a person doing a job. I may not have played at a high level, but if my employer thinks I’m qualified, to me, that’s really my main concern.”
Zwit and Blady both believe that women with backgrounds in business would have the best chance of becoming general managers.
“I think the only fear, and I don’t really think this is a valid fear, with owners who wouldn’t hire a female GM because of the lack of scouting or player development background, is how they would work with a clubhouse,” Blady said. “How are you going to communicate with the players, are the players going to respect you, are you going to be able to control…And I think that’s really a non-issue, I think that’s really a false fear. Any woman who has that kind of business background who’s eloquent enough, and able to negotiate and do all of these things, who’s qualified to be a GM, will certainly be able to control a clubhouse. And I think someone will finally be given her chance, and then the world will see that.”
Ng sees it as more of an education issue, in terms of women understanding that baseball is an available and accessible career path for them.
“The more faces that they see that are like them, the more it might not seem…it’ll just be an option for them, as opposed to, like for myself, it was doing a research paper where I thought, OK, maybe I could do this,” Ng said. “Now they’re going to see these people on TV, being quoted in the papers, you know, where it becomes more of a reality for them, that this is a possibility.”
Ng is certainly doing her part to close the gap for women in the game. She serves on the advisory council for the league’s Diversity Pipeline Program, which was established in 2017 and gives women and people of color the opportunity to learn and develop a wide variety of skills they’d need for a career in baseball.
Ng says the commissioner’s office does a fair amount of networking for women both inside and outside the game, and she’s the executive sponsor of a women’s resource group. There are also networking sessions at the winter meetings, and various panels, on which Ng speaks a handful of times per year. But you don’t need a panel and a conference room to talk to Ng. She’s always available.
Advertisement
“I’m definitely trying to make myself available for young women to talk to,” she said. “So if I’m not that one person, that somebody’s gonna get it at some point soon. Because it’s not, regardless of whether it’s me or not, we’ve got to try and break that ceiling.”
(Top graphic of altered photo from Dylan Buell/Getty Images)