This is a baseball issue, first of all, the product of decades of ubiquitous behavior in the old man’s network, which was ignored, then tolerated and then excused. That day is over, and the bills are going down. There are no more boys who will be boys, and the sport will eventually be better for him.
But first he has to answer for that. He must first recognize how people like Jared Porter and Mickey Callaway have apparently been able to escape the most horrific type of behavior imaginable and continue to move into the food chain of the sport.
Porter, the former general manager of Mets, admitted that he harassed a female reporter with a constant series of text messages, covered by an image of the male genitals. His career is rightly in ruins. Now it’s Callaway’s turn to take a public walk of shame through contempt and embarrassment, with five female reporters accusing him of similarly unwanted advances.
Callaway, so far, denies any wrongdoing, although the women, through The Athletic, have provided some terrible evidence. As in the case of Porter, a reading of some of the saved text messages offers a terrifying tour through the legacy of relentless rights, which has always distorted a certain way, because men were dominant in professional sports, and women simply played players, both in the game, as well as on the fringes.
This dynamic is changing. There’s a GM woman now in Miami in Kim Ng. There are more and more women who cover this sport and who demand nothing more than equality from their male colleagues: equal access (which they had to win through the courts); equal respect (which they have earned with years of quality work); and, finally, equal position. “No” means no in the end. True. Forever.
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 – about how such a character was hired. ever in the first place to actually 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 uncontrolled rise.
But an already dazzling and brighter spotlight shines on how Mets veterinary candidates. It’s pretty clear that the Porter incident has already shaken the team to its core, and in addressing it, Sandy Alderson suggested that a stricter process should be put in place to avoid future embarrassment – using the term “FBI level” at some point. But Alderson also hired Callaway in his first term as Mets baseball boss.
And what must be worrying for Alderson – a straight arrow for which such behavior must be cataclysmically nauseating and which both really came to light when the Porter fiasco came to light and embarrassed when he was forced to admits that he did not speak or even look for female professional references for Porter – is that, correctly or not, Callaway is a second strike against his good name.
Alderson has worked in professional sports long enough to know that not every job you do will be a good one – and from the start it was clear that Callaway was neither qualified for a manager nor blessed with a curveball. learning steep enough to grow into gig. Bad jobs happen even to good executives; George Young once thought Ray Handley would be a good idea.
But now there are two prominent positions that Alderson has held, two men he has hired, who, apparently, should not have been entrusted with any job that would come with even a minimum of power. What made Alderson turn to Steve Cohen, of course, was a sterling reputation that was largely tarnished in the first 40 years of play.
And in the last few weeks, he’s had a bloody beating – and rightly so. Baseball as a whole has a lot to explain and self-analyze to do. So did Sandy Alderson, a 1981 baseball player who was suddenly pushed by two strikes.