A friend suggests “LFGM” now stands for Let’s Find a General Manager. Implicit therein is let’s find a general manager who isn’t as apparently icky as the Mets GM whose stay in the job was brief and whose sudden dismissal from it became fait accompli once certain absolutely damning facts came to light.
On Monday night, ESPN reported that in 2016, Jared Porter, then working in the Cubs front office, had sent a barrage of harassing, explicit texts (lewd photos included) to a female reporter from outside the US attempting to cover baseball, a.k.a. do her job. According to the story by Mina Kimes and Jeff Passan, the reporter left sports media in part because of Porter’s actions. While she tried to cover the game, she felt it necessary to avoid the man who was disturbingly slow to take a hint and leave her be. “I started to ask myself, ‘Why do I have to put myself through these situations to earn a living?’” the now former journalist explained.
Porter confirmed his actions to ESPN, which had been putting together a story about the texts as far back as 2017 but relented in deference to Porter’s target’s concern that “her career would be harmed if the story emerged”. Porter’s career as Mets GM ended within twelve hours of ESPN’s report. This morning Steve Cohen tweeted the executive brought on board in December had just been “terminated,” citing “the importance of integrity” and emphasizing “zero tolerance for this type of behavior”.
What the Mets lacked in vetting when they hired the highly recommended Porter they made up for in decisiveness when they let him go…not that there was much of a decision to be made. What Porter copped to doing was disgusting and, given his own admission, not in dispute. Clever baseball mind or not, you can’t present him to the public as one of the faces of your organization. You certainly can’t implicitly sanction what he did by keeping him around.
Who will be the next general manager? Somebody who doesn’t do stuff like this would be a good baseline qualification.
Several retired professors from my beloved alma mater also confided to me that, back in the day, “LFGM” in many ancient cultures meant “Let’s go find goat milk.”
Let’s hope that the Mets channel what Greg’s friend confided to him rather than what my old professors shared with me.
Uch!
So this happened 5 years ago and no one, no one, in a position to know about it, knew about it. As usual, I find that hard to believe. I worked in Corporate America for almost 40 years before retiring, a lot of that time before social media etc. And yet we almost always knew who in the higher echelons was and who wasn’t a dirtbag.
Who knew that Jared Porter would have the same phone skills as that infamous Mets fan Anthony Weiner?
Mets gotta Met.
How about someone that doesn’t have a penis?
Billy Owens. His friend and former boss Sandy should’ve hired him the first time around.
I think Carlos Beltran is available…
Obviously, this is the universe reminding us that this is still the Mets, whoever owns them.
A little while ago I saw a tweet from a female reporter who asked Sandy at his Zoom call presser if during the vetting process, he had asked any women about Jared Porter. And Sandy said that he had not. Unfortunately, may reaction was “what woman was he going to ask?” One hand baseball presents itself as respecting and welcoming all people, those of any gender/gender identity, any race, any ethnicity, any sexual preference. On the other hand, those running things are virtually all male, overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly American and straight and cisgendered, etc. So just as a room full of white people aren’t going to solve systemic racism, a bunch of bros aren’t likely to spend much time wondering if the candidate they’re interviewing is a misogynist jackass.
Very unclear as to who Sandy could have gotten this information from while vetting Porter. I have no reason to believe that anyone in Mets ownership/management would have let it slide if they had the information, and I was happy that he got fired by 8am. But sports still has a long way to go, including the Mets; they still have one player on the roster who was credibly accused of domestic violence, whose entire punishment was, if I recall, a humongous 10-game suspension. Have to do better.
Which player would that be? (I genuinely don’t recall)
Familia. His wife declined to press charges ultimately, but MLB gave him the aforementioned slap on the wrist. Teams who want to clean things up could start by not employing such players.
Ooooh…! Yeah. Maybe I wished that particular millstone off our neck well enough that I thought it was actually gone…..
It appears nobody in the Mets organization knew about it, and I hope that there was really no way to find out about it beforehand.
At any rate, getting rid of 2 Jareds within 24 hours is the greatest thing since getting rid of Subway Jared.
I concur with one of the above commenters that the Mets had no way of knowing. From what I heard on radio, a person who was notified about this was a low level Cubs employee who did not move the information up the chain of command. I’m pretty sure if it was, we wouldn’t be here talking about because he wouldn’t been hired.
Another commenter mentioned that in corporate America everyone knew who the sleazes were. However, apparently nothing was done, because I’m pretty sure that no one wanted to risk their job/being blacklisted in order to press the matter further.
This hello-and-goodbye thing with key Mets personnel is becoming an annual occurrence …
Oy vey.
A couple of things. Number one, good riddance. That also happens to be numbers two, three, four and five.
Number six – how did this guy keep a high level baseball job for five years after this happened? In a better world, he would have been pink slipped the day after it happened. And possibly relieved of the offending body part as well.
Number seven – it’s a low bar, but at least Steve Cohen handled this thing better than his predecessors would have. You just know that Mutt and Jeff would have found a way to turn this into an even worse mess than it was already.
Number eight – if nothing else, Porter will be the answer to a trivia question – which Met GM traded for Francisco Lindor? Write it down, because no one’s going to remember this guy in about five minutes. Which is as it should be.
Steve Cohen and Sandy Alderson acted swiftly and decidedly in firing this sick guy. Although, it was unfortunate that Mr. Alderson inadvertently mentioned the female reporter’s home country over the radio. You would think that a Harvard educated, Dartmouth law school graduate, not to mention former US Marine Corps officer, would possess the personal restraint and tactfulness NOT to announce this woman’s country of origin, thereby making it that much easier to discover her, until now, anonymous identity, as per her request.
Oh, and how “great” it was to hear Craig “The World Revolves Around Me” Carton opine on this apparently deeply-troubled man, considering Craig Carton’s own past indiscretions? Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.
Of course, WFAN’s Maggie Gray also had to drone on incessantly about this controversy. With that whiny, adenoidal voice of hers, Mrs. Gray almost makes the squeaky Chris “Mad Dog” Russo sound like Sir Laurence Olivier by comparison.
Beam me up, Bill Mazer!
Correction: Make that Dartmouth, B.A. and Harvard, J.D. for Sandy Alderson’s academic degrees.