For so many who love baseball, their passion for the sport was passed down by a parent. That’s definitely the case for Meghan Jones, who grew up near Detroit, where just about everyone cheers for the Tigers.
“My first memories are really just listening to Tiger radio in the backseat of my dad’s car as we were driving my brother to baseball practice or me to a softball practice, so I fell in love with baseball that way,” Jones recalled.
But as much as Jones loved baseball, the idea that she could one day work for a Major League Baseball team never even crossed her mind.
“When I was growing up, I knew that I loved being an athlete. For a while in middle school, I really thought I’d be an Olympic swimmer,” Jones said. “I was dreaming big. But I figured I would do what I could to stay close to athletics.”
Jones went to school in Chicago, at Loyola University, and studied psychology. She thought she’d spend her career doing something related to science, but she ended up doing something much different.
Late last year, the Cubs named her vice president of baseball strategy. The appointment made her the first woman in team history to hold a vice president title in baseball operations, a distinction she hopes inspires other women to follow in her footsteps.
“I hope that my role and my career does inspire, and at least cause some conversation around, ‘Oh – how did Megan get there? I can do that too’. It doesn’t have to be a straight-forward path,” Jones said.
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The 32 year-old began working for the Cubs in 2016 as an executive assistant to Theo Epstein, then president of baseball operations, and Jed Hoyer, the then general manager. She’s been promoted multiple times since then, and Hoyer, now president of baseball operations, considers her an invaluable part of his leadership team.
“She’s a person, if you give her a project, the result she gives back to you is always better than you expect – every time,” Hoyer said.
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Jones spends the majority of her time working at the Cubs Front Office Building next to Wrigley Field, but she also does quite a bit of traveling. She says the main focus of her job centers on two things: player optimization efforts and player acquisition efforts. The latter includes preparing materials to try and best sell the Cubs to free agents and showing them they’re valued as more than just a baseball player.
“Being able to choose where you want to go is really important, and as an organization, there’s so much that goes into that beyond the dollars,” said Jones. “So where I come in is trying to figure out how to package what we do here at the Cubs in the right way for each individual player.”
A good example is when the Cubs pursued Japanese star Seiya Suzuki before the 2022 season. Jones helped create a virtual reality experience to bring Wrigley Field to Suzuki in Japan. Hoyer credits her ingenuity for playing a big role in the outfielder ultimately choosing the North Siders.
“I thought she worked really hard on that,” Hoyer remembered. “Whether the money was the same or it was close, it was clear we won him over based on this place feeling like a family, feeling like a place that would take care of him and take care was his wife, and that was a big part of it.”
Jones calls her mom her biggest inspiration, but she’s also inspired by the women she works with. The Cubs Baseball Operations department has 14 full-time female employees.
“When I started (in 2016), I was the only woman in the Chicago front office in baseball operations, and coming from Discover, I had been one of many women, so it was a little bit of a culture shock,” Jones said. “Today, seven and-a-half years later, to have a number of women in a number of different departments who are all incredibly bright, and the absolute right people for the roles, is huge,” she added.
While Jones said she’s really happy in her current role, she admits she could see herself holding an even more prominent baseball operations job in the future.
And Hoyer agrees.
“The sky’s the limit,” Hoyer said about Jones.
