Tuesday BP, 12/4/18

With Monday’s announcement that the Giants would be bringing in J.P. Ricciardi in as a senior adviser, it was a reminder that they still haven’t hired a GM.

I had been holding off on saying anything about how they handled Kim Ng in this process until they finalized the GM position, hoping that they might still offer her that position. However, considering the amount of time that has passed since they hired Farhan Zaidi, it doesn’t seem likely that they would bring in another candidate for his position this far out.

Which makes their decision to interview her seem exactly like what I had hoped it wouldn’t be: a publicity stunt. As in, “See? We’re inclusive, we’re interviewing a woman (who we have no intention of hiring)!”

Of course, that is making assumptions about their intentions when going into the interview, which is not fair. I have no way to know that, I don’t have access to Larry Baer, but if I did, I’d definitely ask him about it.

And I am not saying Ng should have been hired over Zaidi. I don’t know what their pitches were in the interviews, I don’t know what was said or even what the Giants were really looking for.

However, Ng had said she was only interested in interviewing with teams with serious intentions about hiring her, not wanting to be part of another diversity PR stunt. And yet, that seems to be almost exactly what ended up happening. And that annoys me.

You can’t argue that she’s not qualified (she’s continually on teams’ radars when these types of positions open up) unless you’re prepared to admit that said teams never had any intention of actually hiring her and were only interviewing her to say they interviewed her, which opens up a can of worms of its own.

Anyway, none of that is Zaidi’s fault and I’m excited to see what direction he chooses to go in the coming days and weeks. I just can’t help but be a little annoyed and disappointed by how the Giants ultimately handled things with Ng.