(670 The Score) Cubs president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer was struck by White Sox executive vice president Kenny Williams’ speech at the GM Meetings calling for those across the MLB landscape to do more to increase diversity in front offices, with Hoyer calling it the most powerful moment of the nearly week-long gathering in Carlsbad, Calif.
During a meeting last week, Williams made an impassioned plea for his fellow executives to focus on improving diversity and then act on it, as the Athletic reported.
“Kenny’s words, I think his thoughts were spot on and really powerful,” Hoyer said on the Bernstein & Rahimi Show on Wednesday. “Coming from him and the way he phrased things, I think everybody in the room was in rapt attention. You could hear a pin drop. And he’s 100% right. You look around the room, and it’s very similar backgrounds. I think that’s something that we have to actively work on. We’ve talked about this a lot internally – as we go through each search, how we change our hiring processes. I think it’s a challenge that we all have to undertake.
“It’s not going to be the kind of change that next year, you’re not going to look in that room and it’s going to be completely different. But my hope is over the next three to five to 10 years that that room changes completely. And it should. It should look a lot more like Major League Baseball looks, and it doesn’t right now. The on-field product and the front office, the people working in the front office, it looks different. And we need to change that. Kenny is 100% right that it is time for that change. I think we’ve talked about it a lot, but it hasn’t come yet. What I always talk about is – and I think we’ve done a really good job of this here – over the last few years, I think you have to start that at the grassroots level, really focused on finding diverse perspectives during the hiring process. Because when you look around that room, almost every person in that room came up as an intern. They started at the bottom level as an intern and worked their way up rung by rung. It’s hard to find a lot of people that didn’t play in the big leagues among the executives that didn’t come up that way. So with that, we have to really focus on our lower-level hiring, of finding those diverse perspectives and allowing those employees to grow up through the ranks. And I think when you do that, we’re going to see a tremendous change. So I’m really glad Kenny said that. I thought it was a really impressive moment and I think for everyone that was in the room, that will be the moment they take away from those GM meetings as the most powerful, and he’s right. We all have to do a better job, the Cubs included. I think we’ve done a lot of really good things in this regard over the last year, but we can all be better and we’ll all continue to strive to be better.”
Williams is one of four executives of color in baseball who’s the president of baseball operations or a general manager for a team, the Athletic reported. The others are the Giants’ Farhan Zaidi, the Tigers’ Al Avila and the Marlins’ Kim Ng.
The Cubs recently hired Carter Hawkins, who’s white, as their new general manager. Two minority candidates were among the four finalists, the Athletic reported.