Opinion | Toronto’s Ellen Harrigan has worked in pro baseball for 4 decades. She has 3 World Series rings to show for it

“I was the only candidate who could reach the top of the roster board.”

Four decades ago, Ellen Harrigan found her calling, one that she wasn’t even looking for, because she’s tall.

Fresh out of Senator O’Connor high school in North York in the early ’80s, Harrigan wanted to be a police officer, like her father. But he advised her not to apply to the force until she turned 21, so Harrigan went looking for a job in the meantime.

Harrigan found an ad in the newspaper (she can’t remember which, so we’ll say it was the Star) looking for administrative help and she applied, not knowing who was looking. It turned out to be the Toronto Blue Jays and more than four decades later, she’s still working in baseball, currently as the senior director of baseball administration for the Los Angeles Dodgers.

“The Blue Jays called me up and I went for an interview,” Harrigan recalled from her spring training rental in Arizona as she tunes up for her 43rd season working in professional baseball.

“They had one of those big, black menu boards and you would push the little white letters into it. We would have all of our rosters on that board. Being six feet tall gave me an advantage because I could reach the top of the roster board whenever they made a (roster) move.”

When she started a career that saw her eventually become general manager of the St. Catharines Blue Jays before following Hall of Famer Pat Gillick to Baltimore in the mid-’90s, Harrigan was part of a tiny baseball operations department.

Back then, the Jays’ offices at Exhibition Stadium had her, Gillick, farm director Elliott Wahle and a couple of other administrative support personnel.

“We became experts in all the fields,” said Harrigan, “as opposed to now where you’re laser focused on one particular area. You had five people that did everything that now 40 or 50 people do.”

Harrigan started out looking after housing and transportation, immigration issues and minor-league contracts. She collated scouting reports, which arrived in the mail, and worked to make sure that information was readily available to the people who needed it.

And she got in at the right time. Harrigan was hired by the Jays right after the 1981 strike. They were a year away from embarking on an 11-year run over which they won fewer than 89 games only twice, and never fewer than 86, culminating in back-to-back World Series championships.

“It was so much fun and such a great group of people,” Harrigan said of those early Jays days. “It really taught me that the foundation of success for an organization is the people that you invest in. Not only the players, but the people in the scouting department, the player development department, the front office. To really have a good team in all of those areas, that makes a club successful. I’ve seen that over the years.”

Even though she was running the short-season A-ball farm club in St. Catharines during the World Series years, Harrigan was able to be back in Toronto for those playoff runs.

“I handled international credentials,” said Harrigan, “alongside those that Major League Baseball (were handling), so I still had my hand a little bit in the Toronto post-season and all the excitement that we had there.”

While in St. Catharines, Harrigan oversaw some of the Jays’ top young prospects, including Jeff Kent, Steve Karsay, Nigel Wilson and, of course, Carlos Delgado.

“It was an off-day and (Delgado) had nothing to do,” Harrigan said of the then-catching prospect who spent his age-17 and 18 seasons in St. Catharines. “And I told him, ‘hey, I’ll take you sightseeing, we’ll go to Niagara Falls.’ I picked him up in the van, had my son (Justin) in the car seat. He jumped in and we did the traditional Canadian bring-your-visitors-to-Niagara-Falls day. I do remember him pushing my son in the stroller, and we might even have gone through those tunnels down below where you get the rain jacket and you go behind the falls. I think we did that, too.”

Harrigan was ahead of her time in St. Catharines, not only as the first female GM in professional baseball, and with an all-female front office, along with Marilyn Finn and Eleanor Bowman, but in taking care of the players off the field. Finding them rental accommodations, often in Brock University dorms that were empty for the summer, and even billeting them with local families.

“That was the one thing that set our club apart,” said Harrigan. “We wanted their focus to be 100 per cent on the field, so we tried to do things to make their time in St. Catharines as comfortable and as easy as it could be. We would help them find accommodation close to the ballpark so they could walk to the ballpark. We would set up meal programs at the various local restaurants so they weren’t just eating fast food.”

When Gillick, who Harrigan holds in extremely high regard and calls “the greatest teacher in my career,” left the Orioles (the second of his many retirements — “he’s a fail-to-retire retiree,” Harrigan laughs), his assistant Kevin Malone was hired as the GM of the Dodgers and Harrigan went to the left coast with him.

She’s been with the Dodgers ever since, earning a World Series ring in 2020 to go with the two she got with the Jays.

It hasn’t been all sunshine and rainbows, though. As one of the only women working in baseball operations for the majority of the career, she became familiar with the glass ceiling.

While with the Jays, a position became available that Harrigan thought she was right for and was very interested in.

“But it was the mid-80s,” said Harrigan, “and when I applied for the job I was basically taken aside and told ‘there’s a girls’ bathroom and there’s a boys’ bathroom and the girls don’t go in the boys’ bathroom and the boys don’t go in the girls’ bathroom.’ That was the analogy that was given to me at the time and I remember thinking that it was a terrible way to crush somebody’s dreams, but it was very much the attitude out there.”

Since then, things have gotten a lot better for women in the industry, but not better enough. Kim Ng became the first female GM in the major leagues when she was hired to run the Miami Marlins after the 2020 season, but she deserved that opportunity decades earlier. Most women in baseball front offices still don’t make as much as their male counterparts.

“I’d still like to see more numbers (of women) in the coaching ranks,” said Harrigan, “and certainly in the scouting ranks. That certainly is an area that there are women out there who would be skilled to do that job.”

Mike Wilner is a Toronto-based baseball columnist for the Star and host of the baseball podcast “Deep Left Field.” Follow him on Twitter: @wilnerness

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