baseball GM an esp. people-oriented skill, requiring detailed personal knowledge of individual players in this one-thing-at-a-time sport;
by contrast, are there any female hockey GMs on the horizon?

Of the big 4 N.American team sports, baseball seems the natural, maybe since it poses the least on-field barriers to women (I cannot imagine a women successfully playing a contact sport like pro football or hockey vs. huge men -- but baseball, yes, some day);

nota:

Only three women have risen to assistant GM. The first was Elaine Weddington Steward, hired by the Boston Red Sox in 1990. When Ng left the Yankees, she was replaced by Jean Afterman, a lawyer who had worked for agent Don Nomura.

Afterman said she never felt gender issues with players, but she did when working alongside club officials.

"You feel it in what I call quaint ways," she said. "The guys tend to try to modify their language. There are two things that I try and establish any time I'm going into a room where I don't know the people. One is that I'm an attorney, because there's a healthy respect. The other is I have to drop a profanity as soon as I come in there. I probably have a worse mouth than anybody else in my department."

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[ 10 November 2005: Message edited by: Geneva ]

Could you please shorten the URL, Geneva? We have at least one regular user of babble who uses a larger font due to a vision impairment, and even medium-length URLs cause side-scroll.