Baseball's Female Pioneer

Kim Ng Wants To Become The Big Leagues' First General Manager

(CBS)  Baseball players have been called the Boys of Summer, but for the Los Angeles Dodgers, it's not just the guys swinging for the fences.

As CBS News correspondent Anthony Mason reports, the team has a rising star on the team who's breaking gender barriers.

If you ask Kim Ng if she thinks she's a pioneer, she says, "No, I don't – only when people remind me."

Ng is the Dodger's Assistant General Manager, and the top prospect to become the first female General Manager in Major League Baseball history.

"You know, I've loved sports all my life but never really thought that this was a possibility," she says.

Ng's career began on the high school softball team in Ridgewood, New Jersey. She broke-in to the majors as in intern with the Chicago White Sox and rose to assistant G.M. with the New York Yankees, before sliding into L.A.'s front office.

Now the 37-year-old helps negotiate player trades and millions of dollars in contracts.

Ng says she definitely wants to become a general manger, so much so that she's "willing to wait as long as it takes."

There are 30 general manager jobs in baseball, but a woman has never run the on-field operations of a ball club in the big leagues. The same goes for the NBA, the NFL and the NHL.

In the past, the argument had always been that you had to have played on a professional team to run a professional team. But the recent success of young General Managers – like Boston's Theo Epstein, who never played professionally – has sparked demand for gifted minds regardless of experience or gender.

"It's going to take an owner willing to stick his or her neck out," says sports writer Steve Henson, "Maybe the owner will be a woman – we've had a couple in baseball – to go ahead and make that first hire."

Emily Christy is the general manager of one of the Dodger's minor league teams. The Princeton grad handles everything from marketing to helping lost kids in her ballpark.

"She's the goal to look to," Christy says of Ng. "Basically she stands for it being possible to get there."

But the minor league GM doesn't know how long it will take for a woman to take the reigns in the big leagues.

"I'm not sure," Christy says. "We are getting closer. I would not be surprised if it weren't in the next few years."

But, Ng thinks the last step in her climb might be the biggest and toughest one to take.

"The difference between an assistant GM and a general manager is huge," she says. "I think having to pay your dues is a big part of it – and that's what I am doing."

The return on that investment could make baseball history.