BSM Writers
How Did MLB, Cubs Not Know About Porter’s Lewd Texts?
A troubled sport faces a new crisis: Was a talented, young executive protected from his 2016 conduct by a network of cronies, including those in Chicago, who enabled a rising career that ended in disgrace?
Baseball once had an old-boy problem, a network of ownership cronies who ruled the sport’s inner sanctum via backroom politics and finer cigars. Now, it has a bro-dude problem, a sabercreep problem, a new fraternal culture that somehow enabled Jared Porter to remain a coveted young executive for four years after texting a photo of his erect, naked penis to a female reporter.
It’s highly improbable, given the loose lips in Major League Baseball, that someone in the Chicago Cubs’ hierarchy didn’t know about the 2016 sexting story involving Porter — then their 36-year-old director of professional scouting — until this week’s ESPN expose. The time gap is disturbingly long, the length of Donald Trump’s presidency, and Porter’s career never should have been allowed to ascend to the high-profile point where the shamed New York Mets finally fired him Tuesday as general manager.
How could this happen? How could the Cubs and the rest of MLB not know? That’s what the Cubs are claiming — and it should be underlined here that the savior-in-charge during the 2010s, Theo Epstein, resigned two months ago. In the story by Mina Kimes and Jeff Passan, ESPN reports “a baseball source” tipped them to Porter’s conduct in December 2017, more than a year after his uninvited barrage of suggestive text messages and lewd photos to a woman who’d moved to the United States to cover baseball. That source was one of several people who reportedly knew about the texts — including, stunningly, a Cubs employee from her home country.
The reporter, fearing reprisal from Porter and unsympathetic people in her native land, said she was connected to the Cubs employee by a lawyer referred by her media bosses back home. According to ESPN, that employee contacted Porter, who said he wanted to apologize in person — a request she rejected. By this point, she also had alerted a major-league player from her native country, seeking further advice.
Come on. How did the Cubs not know? Are we supposed to believe that a team employee, acting independently, didn’t tell anyone at Wrigley Field about the allegations other than Porter? That Epstein, who had groomed Porter as part of his bro-dude posse with the Boston Red Sox, didn’t know a thing about the story? That current Cubs general manager Jed Hoyer, part of the same Boston posse, hadn’t heard a word? How did team owner Tom Ricketts not know? How did the commissioner’s office, with its expansive security and surveillance detail, not know?
Or did they know?
“This story came to our attention tonight and we are not aware of this incident ever being reported to the organization,” the Cubs said in a Monday night statement to ESPN. “Had we been notified, we would have taken swift action as the alleged behavior is in violation of our code of conduct. While these two individuals are no longer with the organization, we take issues of sexual harassment seriously and plan to investigate the matter.”
The investigation should extend to the MLB office, where Epstein was hired last week as a consultant to commissioner Rob Manfred. In any event, this is a troubling indictment of the industry’s bro-dude culture, given Porter’s career arc since the sexting-and-photos flurries. After apologizing to the woman via text and thinking he was home clear, he became assistant general manager of the Arizona Diamondbacks in the 2016 offseason, after Epstein and the Cubs had broken a 108-year drought and won the World Series in a festive Chicago. Last month, not vetted by the Mets, Porter was named GM in multibillionaire owner Steven Cohen’s new regime — the same Steve Cohen whose investment firm was accused of harassment toward women in 2018.
“We have terminated Jared Porter this morning,” Cohen wrote Tuesday on Twitter. “In my initial press conference I spoke about the importance of integrity and I meant it. There should be zero tolerance for this type of behavior.”
Then why didn’t Cohen spend more time investigating Porter before hiring him? Making phone calls? Asking around? The owner is new to the sport, but baseball operations boss Sandy Alderson is a baseball lifer — straight from the old-boy network, in fact — and he also whiffed badly here. After Porter’s firing, Alderson delivered a wishy-washy response, suggesting extensive vetting isn’t always possible. It’s 2021, Sandy. Your boss is one of the richest people in America. Don’t pass the buck.
“This is a wake-up call. It clearly suggests something like this can be out there in connection with almost anyone,” said Alderson, back for another tour of Mets duty at 73. “We have do to our best to make sure we know about that information, but there are limits to what we can actually get. I don’t think this reflects a fundamental flaw in the process. I think this is a very unfortunate circumstance that we wish we knew about, but didn’t.”
In covering his own tail, Alderson said the Cubs, Diamondbacks and Red Sox praised Porter during his discussions with team executives. Keep in mind that an Epstein link threads through all three franchises. “There really wasn’t a dissenting voice, so from my standpoint, I was shocked. Eventually that gives away to disappointment and a little bit of anger,” Alderson said. “There’s always a risk associated with hiring. There was no disclosure of this conduct. I don’t think we would have hired Jared if we had known about the conduct beforehand. Should we have known? We did a background check. We asked if there was anything else we need to know.”
He didn’t ask enough.
In a case of extreme sensitivity, credit ESPN for resisting any journalistic temptation to report what it knew and corroborated in late 2017. Realizing it could be accused of sitting on explosive information and protecting Porter and the network’s high-priced partnership with MLB, ESPN rightfully ceded to the female reporter’s request to not publish the story then when, according to Kimes and Passan, she had “concluded her career would be harmed if the story emerged.” As the aggrieved party, her wishes took precedence.
Someone should explain journalism ethics to WFAN’s Craig Carton and Evan Roberts, who accused ESPN of just that: sitting on the story for years. Passan responded in kind on ESPN Radio in New York.
“There’s another radio station in New York that’s been pretty damn irresponsible today about its coverage of this, and I hate giving them any shine because they don’t deserve it,” Passan said. “But the notion that ESPN has been sitting on this story since 2017 is the most giant load of irresponsible garbage that I’ve heard in a long time. We have duties as journalists to protect our sources and to look after the people who give us the stories that we get to tell. It is their story, it is not ours. And the idea that we have been sitting on this, because this woman, who went through a horrendous thing with somebody in a position of power and ended up having to move back to her country and get out of journalism because of it, the idea that she wasn’t ready at that time is perfectly rational and normal and the type of response that I think any of us could go through. She wasn’t ready.
“The story waits for when the person whose it is, is ready to tell it. And so, she waited, and she left the industry where she was worried she was going to have backlash and potentially have her job harmed. And she saw Jared Porter’s rise to general manager of the New York Mets, putting him in a position of great power and great authority, and thought to herself, ‘This man, who has his dream job, ended up facilitating me losing my dream job. And I didn’t do anything … I didn’t do anything.’ And so the idea that this story, four-and-a-half years after this incident happened, has any less resonance, has any less importance, and has any less right to be told — anybody who thinks that needs to shut up.”
And, no, ESPN was not obligated to alert MLB, the Cubs, the Diamondbacks or the Mets about what Kimes knew, though we’re not stupid. Enough people knew about the story to circulate it around a gossipy industry.
Carton also didn’t do his homework about Passan, accusing the baseball insider of knowing about Porter’s texts when he praised his hiring last month. Passan said he only recently was assigned to report the story with Kimes — after Porter was hired. “The issue isn’t about protecting the victim. Of course you do,” Carton tweeted. “Issue is that Passan endorsed Porter said he had the perfect ‘temperament’ for NYC knowing he was a stalker and had harassed a woman.”
ESPN sometimes flouts journalistic rules. Not this time.
When Porter was named Mets’ GM, the woman decided to go public with her story, telling ESPN through an interpreter, “My number one motivation is I want to prevent this from happening to someone else. Obviously, he’s in a much greater position of power. I want to prevent that from happening again. The other thing is, I never really got the notion that he was truly sorry.”
Porter’s “apology” came after she had asked the major-league player from her home country to help compose a response. She subsequently wrote Porter: “This is extremely inappropriate, very offensive, and getting out of line. Could you please stop sending offensive photos or msg.”
“Oh I’m sorry,” Porter responded.
“I will stop.”
He stopped texting. But his career carried on, the perpetuation of which is the latest crisis in a sport that cannot get out of its own way. Here we thought Epstein might rescue MLB from its self-destructive plague the way he smashed curses in Chicago and Boston.
Now, he might be baseball’s newest problem. Why didn’t he know? And how couldn’t he have known?
Jay Mariotti, called “the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes a weekly media column for Barrett Sports Media and regular sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts in production today. He’s an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and radio talk host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects. Compensation for this column is donated to the Chicago Sun-Times Charity Trust.
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BSM Writers
Who Can Sports Fans Trust Once Twitter Ditches Legacy Verified Blue Checks?
The potential for Twitter chaos after April 1 is looming.
As of April 1, Twitter will finally make a dreaded change that many will view as an April Fools’ prank. Unfortunately, it won’t be a joke to any user who cares about legitimacy and truth.
Last week, Twitter officially announced that verified blue checkmarks will be removed from accounts that have not signed up for a Twitter Blue subscription. Previously, accounts whose identity had been verified were allowed to keep their blue checks when Twitter Blue was implemented.
But shortly after Elon Musk purchased Twitter and became the social media company’s CEO, he stated his intention to use verification as a revenue source. Users would have to pay $8 per month (or $84 annually) for a Twitter Blue subscription and blue checkmark verification. Paying for blue checks immediately set off red flags among users who learned to depend on verified accounts for accredited identities and trusted information.
The entire concept of verification and blue checks was simple and effective. Users and accounts bearing the blue checkmark were legitimate. These people and organizations were who they said they were.
As an example, ESPN’s Adam Schefter has faced criticism for how he framed domestic violence and sexual misconduct involving star NFL players, and deservedly so. But fans and media know Schefter’s tweets are really coming from him because his account is verified.
Furthermore, Twitter took the additional step of clarifying that accounts such as Schefter’s were verified before Twitter Blue was implemented. He didn’t pay eight dollars for that blue checkmark.
The need for verification is never more vital than when fake accounts are created to deceive users. Such accounts will put “Adam Schefter” as their Twitter name, even if their handle is something like “@TuaNeedsHelp.” Or worse, some fake accounts will create a handle with letters that look similar. So “@AdarnSchefter” with an “rn” in place of the “m,” fools some people, especially at a quick glance when people are trying to push news out as fast as possible.
Plenty of baseball fans have been duped over the years by fake accounts using a zero instead of an “o” or a capital “I” instead of a lowercase “l” to resemble Fox Sports and The Athletic reporter Ken Rosenthal. That trick didn’t get me. But when I covered Major League Baseball for Bleacher Report 10 years ago, I did fall for a fake Jim Salisbury account that reported the Philadelphia Phillies traded Hunter Pence to the San Francisco Giants. Capital “I,” not lowercase “l” in “Salisbury.” Pence was, in fact, traded to the Giants two days later, but that didn’t make my goof any less embarrassing. I should’ve looked for the blue checkmark!
But after April 1, that signifier won’t matter. Legacy blue checkmarks will be removed from accounts that haven’t paid for Twitter Blue. Some accounts that were previously verified might purchase a subscription to maintain that blue check. But those that were deemed legitimate prior to Musk taking over Twitter likely won’t. (There are also rumors that Twitter is considering a feature that would allow Twitter Blue subscribers to hide their blue check and avoid revealing that purchase.)
That could be even more true for media organizations, which are being told to pay $1000 per month for verification. Do you think ESPN, the New York Times, or the Washington Post will pay $12,000 for a blue check?
We’ve already seen the problems that paying for verification can cause. Shortly after Twitter Blue launched, accounts pretending to be legacy verified users could be created. A fake Adam Schefter account tweeted that the Las Vegas Raiders had fired head coach Josh McDaniels. Users who saw the “Adam Schefter” Twitter name went with the news without looking more closely at the “@AdamSchefterNOT” handle. But there was a blue checkmark next to the name this time!
The same thing occurred with a fake LeBron James account tweeting that the NBA superstar had requested a trade from the Los Angeles Lakers. There was a “@KINGJamez” handle, but a “LeBron James” Twitter name with a blue check next to it.
Whether it’s because fans and media have become more discerning or Twitter has done good work cracking down on such fake accounts, there haven’t been many outrageous examples of deliberate deception since last November. But the potential for Twitter chaos after April 1 is looming.
If that seems like an overstatement, it’s a very real possibility that there will be an erosion of trust among Twitter users. Media and fans may have to take a breath before quickly tweeting and retweeting news from accounts that may or may not be credible. False news and phony statements could spread quickly and go viral across social media.
Even worse, Musk has announced that only verified Twitter Blue accounts will be seen in your “For You” timeline as of April 15. (He can’t claim it’s an April Fools’ Day joke on that date.)
Obviously, that carries far more serious real-world implications beyond sports. Forget about a fake Shams Charania account tweeting that Luka Dončić wants to be traded to the Lakers. It’s not difficult to imagine a fake Joe Biden account declaring war on Russia and some people believing it’s true because of the blue checkmark.
We may be nearing the end of Twitter being a reliable news-gathering tool. If the accounts tweeting out news can’t be trusted, where’s the value? Reporters and newsmakers may end up going to other social media platforms to break stories and carry the viability of verification.
When Fox Sports’ website infamously pivoted to video in 2017, Ken Rosenthal posted his MLB reporting on Facebook prior to joining The Athletic. Hello, Instagram. Will someone take their following and reputation to a fledgling platform like Mastodon, Post, Spoutible, or BlueSky, even if it means a lesser outlet?
If and when that happens, Twitter could still be a community but not nearly as much fun. Not when it becomes a matter of trust that breaks up the party.
Ian Casselberry is a sports media columnist for BSM. He has previously written and edited for Awful Announcing, The Comeback, Sports Illustrated, Yahoo Sports, MLive, Bleacher Report, and SB Nation. You can find him on Twitter @iancass or reach him by email at iancass@gmail.com.
BSM Writers
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