This is a baseball problem, first and foremost, the product of decades of ubiquitous behavior by the network of old people who used to be ignored, tolerated and excused. That day is over and the bills are due. There are no more boys who will be boys and eventually the sport will be better for that.
But first you have to answer it. You have to first recognize how it was that people like Jared Porter and Mickey Callaway were apparently able to come out with the most creepy kind of behavior imaginable and keep moving around the sport’s food chain.
Porter, the former Mets CEO, admitted he harassed a reporter with a relentless string of text messages, covered in an image of the male genitals. His career, rightly, lies in ruins. Now it’s Callaway’s turn to take a public walk of shame through contempt and shame, five reporters accusing him of unwanted advances in the same way.
Callaway, so far, denies any offense, although the women, through The Athletic, have provided some terribly convincing evidence. As with Porter, reading some of the saved text messages provides a chilling run through the legacy of a relentless right that has always skewed a certain way because men were dominant in professional sports and women only bit players, both within the game and in fringes.
This dynamic is changing. Now there’s a GM woman, in Miami, in Kim Ng. More and more women are covering sport and demanding nothing more than an equal footing from their male counterparts: equal access (which they had to win through the courts); equal respect (which they have earned with years of quality work); and, finally, equal right. “No” finally means no. For real. For canning.
The Mets, of course, are one of the teams that will have to answer not so much for Callaway’s alleged misbehavior (if true, that stain falls entirely on him) as to how this character was ever hired in the first place to really manage. 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 rise.
But it shines an already blinding focus even brighter on the way the Mets veterinarian candidates. It is quite clear that the Porter incident has already shaken the team to its core, and in addressing it, Sandy Alderson hinted that a stricter process should be implemented in order to avoid future embarrassment. , using the term “FBI level” at any given time. But Alderson also hired Callaway in his first term as head coach of the Mets.
And what must be worrying for Alderson: a decidedly straight arrow for whom this behavior must be a cataclysm and which seemed genuinely painful when Porter’s fiasco came to light and he was ashamed when he was forced to admit it. who had not spoken to him. or even sought out female professional references for Porter: is that, fairly or not, Callaway is a second strike against her good name.
Alderson has been in professional sports long enough to know that not every contract you make will be good – and from the start it was clear that Callaway was not qualified for the manager’s job nor was he welcomed with a learning curve. strong enough to become a concert. Bad hiring goes even to good executives; George Young once thought Ray Handley would be a good idea.
Now, these are two prominent positions that Alderson has held, two men he has hired who apparently should not have been entrusted with any job that entailed any power. What made Alderson attractive to Steve Cohen, of course, was a sterling reputation that had been mostly unfinished during his first 40 years in the game.
And, in recent weeks, he has received a bloody beating, and rightly so. Baseball as a whole has a lot to explain and self-analyze. And Sandy Alderson, a victim of baseball since 1981, also does so suddenly with a count of two attacks.