Kim Ng Is Leaving the Marlins Better Than She Found Them

The Marlins announced Monday that general manager Kim Ng would not return in 2024.

The club decided to exercise its half of the mutual option in her contract, but Ng declined to exercise hers, allowing the executive to pursue other opportunities.

Ng led the Marlins for three seasons—overseeing the team as it clawed its way out of mediocrity to become a playoff team. Before coming to Miami, she had decades of experience in the game, including as senior vice president of baseball operations for the commissioner’s office and as an assistant GM with the Yankees and the Dodgers. Ng’s hiring in November 2020 was historic. She was the first female GM of a men’s big four professional sports team in North America and the first GM of East Asian descent in MLB. Now, she has chosen to depart on her own terms, citing a disagreement about the club’s direction with Marlins majority owner Bruce Sherman.

“Last week, Bruce and I discussed his plan to reshape the baseball operations department,” Ng told Tyler Kepner of The Athletic on Monday. “In our discussions, it became apparent that we were not completely aligned on what that should look like and I felt it best to step away.”

One potential landing spot for Ng could be the Red Sox, who fired chief baseball officer Chaim Bloom in September, though other possibilities could materialize in the weeks to come. The Mets have already filled their top vacancy with former Brewers executive David Stearns, but they do theoretically have an open space in the position formerly held by former GM Billy Eppler, who resigned earlier this month. The White Sox have filled their vacancy by promoting Chris Getz.

How best to judge Ng’s tenure with the Marlins? This season in particular held plenty of positives. It was their winningest campaign since 2009. (It also came with their first playoff berth in a full season since their World Series run in ’03—though it came to an end quickly when they were swept in the wild-card round by the Phillies.) They have a young, admirably capable pitching staff, and while their offense is rather out of step with modern trends, built around contact rather than power, it didn’t prevent them from making it to October. The roster includes batting champ Luis Arraez, under contract for the next two years, and 20-year-old pitching phenom Eury Pérez. There's a lot of promise here. Yet the Marlins still did not look exactly like a winning team this season. They ended the year with a negative run differential—not just the worst of any playoff team but worse than many teams that failed to make the postseason. Much of their success came from their record in one-run games. It’s fair to say that winning is winning, regardless of how it looks. But there was plenty here to suggest that the success of this season might not be easily replicable in Miami.

Still, the process of overhauling a club can be gradual. Three seasons is a relatively short window, particularly under ownership that does not allow much in the way of spending, as is the case with Sherman and the Marlins. (Miami’s payroll ranked 22nd out of 30 this year—some $60 million below league average—and it was the first season of Ng’s tenure in which the club ranked above 25th.) But even in this limited stretch, even with the necessary caveats about this year’s winning performance, Ng was nonetheless successful. She took a team that had not made the postseason in a full season in nearly two decades and helped steer them back to October. She hired first-time manager Skip Schumaker. Miami is clearly better situated now than it was three years ago.

That Ng chose to leave on her own terms—rather than continue in a potentially frustrating situation under Sherman—speaks volumes. And it suggests that she has reason to believe her next opportunity may be an even better one.