This is a baseball problem, primarily the product of decades of ubiquitous old-fashioned network behavior that used to be ignored and then tolerated and then excused. That day is over and the bills have to be paid. There are no more boys, and the sport will eventually get better.
But first it has to account for it. First, it has to recognize how it came about that people like Jared Porter and Mickey Callaway were apparently able to get away with some of the scariest kind of behavior imaginable, and keep moving up the sport’s food chain.
Porter, the former general manager of the Mets, admitted to harassing a female reporter with a relentless series of text messages depicting male genitalia. His career is rightly in ruins. Now it’s Callaway’s turn to take a very public walk of shame through contempt and embarrassment, with five female reporters accusing him of similar unwelcome advances.
Callaway has thus far denied any wrongdoing, although the women, through The Athletic, have provided terribly compelling evidence. As with Porter, perusing some of the stored text message provides a chilling tour of the legacy of ruthless rights that have always been skewed in some way because men were dominant in professional sports and women just bit players, both in the game as at the game. fringes.
That dynamic is changing. There is now a female GM in Kim Ng in Miami. There are more and more women involved in sports demanding nothing more than equal footing with their male colleagues: equal access (which they had to earn through the courts); equal respect (that they have earned through years of quality work); and finally equivalent. After all, “no” means no. Really. To keep.
The Mets are, of course, one of the teams that will have to answer not so much about Callaway’s alleged misconduct – if true, that blemish falls entirely on him – as about how such a character was ever hired in the first. place to actually lead the baseball team. The Indians and Angels must answer the same questions about Callaway – just as the Cubs and Diamondbacks share responsibility for Porter’s uncontrolled turnout.
But it shines an already blinding spotlight even brighter in the way the Mets vet candidates do. It’s pretty clear that the Porter incident has already shocked the team to the core, and in addressing it, Sandy Alderson hinted that a stricter process needed to be implemented to avoid future embarrassment – at one point he used the term “FBI level”. But Alderson also hired Callaway, in his first term as the Mets’ baseball boss.
And what should worry Alderson – a decidedly straight arrow to whom such behavior must be cataclysmically nauseating, and who seemed genuinely both pained when Porter’s fiasco came to light and embarrassed to admit he hadn’t spoken or even searched for female professional credentials for Porter – is that, fair or not, Callaway is a second assault on his reputation.
Alderson has been practicing the professional sport long enough to know that not every hiring you do is going to be a good one – and from the start, it was abundantly clear that Callaway was neither qualified for the manager’s job nor blessed with a steep enough learning curve to by growing to the gig. Bad hiring occurs even with good executives; George Young once thought Ray Handley would be a good idea.
But these are now two prominent positions that Alderson has held, two men he has taken on who apparently should not have gotten any job that entails the slightest bit of power. Of course, what made Alderson attractive to Steve Cohen was an excellent reputation that had remained largely untainted during his first 40 years in the game.
And has taken a bloody beating in recent weeks – and rightly so. Baseball as a whole has a lot of explanation and self-analysis to do. And that includes Sandy Alderson, baseball player since 1981, suddenly saddled with a count of two strokes.