This is a baseball problem, first of all, the product of decades of widespread network behavior from old friends that used to be ignored and then tolerated and then dismissed. That day is over and the bills are falling due. There are no more boys who are going to be boys, and the sport will end up being better for that.
But first he has to answer for that. First, he has to recognize how people like Jared Porter and Mickey Callaway were apparently able to get away with the most frightening type of behavior imaginable and continue up the sport’s food chain.
Porter, the former Mets general manager, admitted to harassing a reporter with a relentless string of text messages, culminating in a photo of the male genitalia. His career, rightly, is in ruins. Now it is Callaway’s turn to take a public walk of shame through contempt and embarrassment, five reporters accusing him of equally unwanted advances.
Callaway has so far denied any wrongdoing, although women, through The Athletic, have provided some terribly convincing evidence. As with Porter, reading some of the saved text messages provides a chilling tour of the legacy of relentless rights that has always distorted in a way because men were dominant in professional sports and women just bit players, both inside and out. the game as well as on its fringes.
This dynamic is changing. There’s a GM woman now, in Miami, at Kim Ng. There are more and more women covering the sport and demanding nothing more than equal conditions for their male colleagues: equal access (which they had to gain on the courts); equal respect (which they have earned with years of quality work); and, finally, equal position. “No” finally means no. Seriously. Forever.
Mets, of course, is one of the teams that will have to answer not so much for Callaway’s alleged bad behavior – if that is true, that stain falls entirely on him – as to how that character was hired in the first place to really manage the team. baseball. The Indians and Angels have to answer the same questions about Callaway – just as the Cubs and Diamondbacks share responsibility for Porter’s unbridled rise.
But it shines an already blinding spotlight even more on the way Mets veterinary candidates. It is quite clear that the Porter incident has already shaken the team at its core and, by addressing it, Sandy Alderson hinted that a more rigorous process should be implemented to avoid future constraints – using the term “FBI level” in a Score. But Alderson hired Callaway as well, in his first term as head of baseball for the Mets.
And what should be worrying for Alderson – a decidedly direct arrow for whom such behavior must be cataclysmically nauseating, and which genuinely seemed so sad when Porter’s fiasco surfaced and embarrassed when he was forced to admit that he had not spoken to or even looked for professional female references to Porter – is that, justly or not, Callaway is a second blow to his good name.
Alderson has been in professional sport long enough to know that not every hiring you make will be a good one – and from the beginning it was pretty clear that Callaway was not qualified for the job of manager or blessed with a steep enough learning curve to grow to the show. Bad hires 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 filled, two men he has hired and who apparently shouldn’t have been in charge of any position that comes with the least amount of power. What made Alderson attractive to Steve Cohen, of course, was an excellent reputation that had been practically immaculate during his first 40 years in the game.
And in the past few weeks, he has been given a bloody beating – and with good reason. Baseball as a whole has a lot to explain and self-analyze. And so does Sandy Alderson, who has lived in baseball since 1981, suddenly overwhelmed with a two-stroke count.