A major league team has yet to have a woman run its baseball operations, but Kim Ng is a solid candidate who has built an impressive resume over the last two decades. Is MLB ready for her?

The decision-makers in baseball are slow to change. The color barrier remained in place until 1947, and it was nearly three decades later, in 1975, that Hall of Famer Frank Robinson became the first manager of color. It was nearly 20 more years before Bob Watson became the first non-white general manager.

This resistance to change is apparent in other aspects of the game. Over the last 30 years, Bill James and others have spawned new ways to study the game through statistical analysis. They have created stats that have worked their way into the mainstream of baseball coverage.

Despite the validity and insight of the early sabermetricians, their approach is only beginning to draw interest from baseball old-timers in front offices and coaching positions. Slowly some of the best analysts, including James, have worked their way into baseball operations departments.

The notion that tools and skills are the only valid measures of talent has been challenged by sabermetricians, who believe minor league numbers also are worth studying when evaluating young players.

Most stats geeks have never played the game at a high level, and often that’s behind the bias against non-traditional methods. Robinson and Watson were talented players, of course, and in time, that fact had to make a difference in opening doors to them.

The next challenge to traditional barriers in management may be waged by Kim Ng, who has spent 17 years working in baseball and ranks among the most promising GM candidates in the game. She’s neither white nor male, and biases against her running a team’s baseball operations are just as likely to focus on the fact that she hasn’t played the game professionally.

Of course, Boston GM and sabermetrician Theo Epstein hasn’t played pro ball, but he’s directed the Red Sox to a pair of World Series titles in the last four years. The men who played the game and later oversaw the Red Sox failed to win a championship through the previous 85 seasons.

After playing softball for four years and earning a bachelor’s degree in public policy from the University of Chicago, Ng began her baseball career in 1991 as an intern with the White Sox. Sabermetric statistical analysis was just starting to find its way into big league front offices, and working the numbers with computers was something in which Ng excelled.

Now 39 years old, Ng has spent the last 11 seasons as an assistant general manager for the New York Yankees and the Los Angeles Dodgers. She has worked with manager Joe Torre on both coasts, and he’s impressed with her knowledge and skills.

Assistant general managers don’t attract much public attention, but Ng was forced into the national spotlight roughly five years ago at the GM meetings in Phoenix. She was approached by former big league pitcher Bill Singer, who was a special assistant to then-Mets GM Jim Duquette. Singer stopped Ng and asked her who she was and why she was in attendance. She patiently handled his questions before Singer mocked her by uttering sounds that were supposed to approximate Chinese. Ng, a Chinese-American, considered the confrontation to be more about sexism than racism.

Ng’s story is an interesting one. Tim Brown of Yahoo! Sports wrote a fascinating feature last week about her and the matter of breaking barriers in baseball. It’s a terrific read, well worth a look.

Ng is likely to attract interviews for GM jobs in coming years. Whether they are serious or lip service remains to be seen. She is quick to point that there are others -- both men and women -- who share her career path, but Ng is likely to be the one who breaks down the gender barrier.