Dodger Executive Adds a New Ring

Qim Ng should know what some Dodger fans are thinking.

“We need a starting pitcher and all we got was a girl.”

And: “The Yankees need a first baseman. The Dodgers need a first baseman. The Yankees will probably get Jason Giambi. All we get from the Yankees is a girl.”

Also: “We’re the Dodgers, darn it, and we want to win a World Series and all we have gotten so far in this off-season is a girl.”

Ng, 33, is the Dodgers’ new assistant general manager. Their first conference call of the off-season wasn’t to announce a big free-agent signing but rather the hiring of Ng, an infielder on her University of Chicago softball team and a public policy major who thought she’d be a banker like her mother and her late father.

“Yeah, it was about seven years before my mom quit asking when I was going back to school to get my masters in finance and a real job,” Ng says.

Ng--it’s pronounced Ang--never thought she’d be an assistant general manager for a major league team. She grew up in New Jersey, the oldest of five girls and a jock for all seasons--tennis, softball, volleyball. She was a Yankee fan. But she was a girl, a serious student and certainly not planning to understand the vagaries of the waiver wire or to be scouring the triple-A rosters for possible Yankee bench fillers.

She never expected to have three World Series rings in her jewelry box. They are big and gaudy and Ng hardly ever wears them, but she absolutely loves them.

She got into baseball by accident. After graduating from college, Ng interviewed with several financial institutions but got no job offers.

“I was working on campus for a few months when one of my old coaches saw me walking down the street,” Ng says. “She asked me if I was still interested in sports. I said I was and she said the White Sox were looking for an intern, that the Sox had just called.

“I printed out my resume, raced down there, had two interviews and landed the internship. And I realized I didn’t want to work for a bank. I’d much rather work in sports.”

Within days, Ng was revamping computer systems and showing veteran baseball men how they could use that newfangled equipment to track statistics, trends, performances, salaries.

“We had five potential arbitration cases that winter and we only went to arbitration on one,” she says. “Cory Snyder. We won.”

The White Sox happily hired Ng after the internship ended. Dan Evans became her boss and her mentor. After four years with the Sox, she was promoted to assistant director of baseball operations. In 1997, she was named director of waivers and player records for the American League, and a year later was hired by the Yankees to assist General Manager Brian Cashman.

Ng was 29. She was of Chinese ancestry. She was a woman. Any one of these things would have made Ng one of a kind in a roomful of baseball executives.

“But, honestly, I never felt any resentment or anything,” she says. “At least I didn’t sense a lot of skepticism. I was able to prove myself pretty quickly too. I just didn’t leave very much room for people to find fault.”

Ng speaks rapturously of the joys of arbitration, of the thrill, as she says, “of maneuvering a roster, setting yourself up for the short term and long term. That takes a lot of skill and foresight.”

So could she have helped keep the Dodgers out of so many long-term contracts with hurt or aging pitchers? Would she have helped keep the Dodgers from having one of the top payrolls in the game and only mediocre results to show for it?

Come on, Ng is no rookie. She’s not answering those questions.

“My mission with Brian [Cashman] was always to improve the Yankees, whether that was by signing free agents, using the waiver wires to get an insurance policy, trying to build the organization through and through,” she says.

When her Yankee contract was up at the end of the season, Ng was thinking of options outside of baseball.

“Not everybody understands how much work goes into putting a team together every year,” she says. “The number of hours, the way it dominates your life.”

But her mentor, Evans, now the general manager of the Dodgers, called. And, Ng, whose Dodger role will be similar to her responsibility with the Yankees, says, “Honestly, baseball is still in my system.”

She has never spent her life trying to be the “first” woman, Chinese or any other “first” in her position. She is convinced that there will be a female general manager in major league baseball.

“After all, Great Britain has had a woman prime minister,” she says.

When it is pointed out that Margaret Thatcher won an election to that position, an election in which women voted, and that major league baseball general manager positions are not democratically voted on, Ng laughs.

Her desire is for any job she has to be earned. She would never consider herself some sort of quota hire. Ng’s father, Jim, was born in China and died when she was in grade school. Jim loved baseball, Ng says.

“He was a big jock. We’d go skiing almost every other weekend in the winter. My dad played tennis and softball. He loved to watch football. My mom played tennis, she was really good. Sports was just part of our life every day.”

Ng loves the complexity of baseball. “You can go back and look at a specific pitch or pitches, specific events and you can see how the situation of a game brought about a certain pitch,” she says.

“In basketball, for example, you can appreciate a Shaq dunk, you remember who he dunked over but you can’t really see how that was set up. You can look at situations in a baseball game and see how it changes with each pitch.”

Talking baseball with Ng can be an all-day affair. She can talk about the beauty of a fastball, the geometry of a hit-and-run play. She loves the way a computer can tell her which second basemen turn the most double plays, which leadoff hitters put the ball in play the most. She can stare down an agent and ask a player about his wife.

There will always be doubters: “Have you played the game? Have you put on a jock? Have you been in the batter’s box with two on and two out in the bottom of the ninth?” Those are the questions women get when they have sports jobs, even now.

Whatever the question, Ng has that answer: “The Yankees haven’t done so badly in my four years.”

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Diane Pucin can be reached at diane.pucin@latimes.com.