Women around the game endure indignities their male colleagues rarely even consider. Porter’s abhorrent treatment of a reporter is just the latest example.
Jared Porter left the Mets no choice. Late Monday night, when ESPN published the lurid details of his lecherous pursuit of a female reporter in 2016, Porter was as good as gone. By 8 a.m. on Tuesday, Steven A. Cohen, the Mets’ owner, had fired his recently hired general manager. It was the first crisis of Cohen’s brief ownership of the Mets, and he handled it swiftly, without equivocation. That was refreshing, though any other decision would have defied logic. If your house is on fire, you put out the fire. The longer it burns, the worse it gets. This makes two Januarys in a row in which the Mets have dumped a newly hired top decision-maker before spring training. Last year they dropped Carlos Beltran as manager for his role in the Houston Astros’ cheating scandal. Now Porter has texted his way out of a dream job as top lieutenant to Sandy Alderson, who heard only rave reviews about Porter in the interview process. “There wasn’t really a dissenting voice,” said Alderson, the team president, who later acknowledged that he did not ask any women about Porter. “From my standpoint, I was shocked. Eventually that gives way to disappointment and a little bit of anger. This was a total surprise to us.” The Mets will proceed without a replacement for Porter, Alderson said, citing his confidence in the rest of the front office and being in the late stage of the off-season. The team hired another finalist for the general manager job, Zack Scott, as a senior vice president and assistant general manager in December. Yet this is really not a Mets story. Porter was working for the Chicago Cubs when he harassed the reporter — sending her a photo of a penis, another of a bulging crotch, and a barrage of 62 texts without an answer — and was working for the Arizona Diamondbacks when the Mets hired him. The truly disturbing part of this saga is how it graphically illustrates the garbage many women endure while working in and around baseball.
