It's really not that difficult to not text a woman a picture of your penis
Sometimes I feel like the only one who realizes that
It’s possible to frame the Jared Porter story as the Mets’ inexorable pull towards being the Mets. There is something so perfectly Flushing, New York about it after all; after getting a new owner who’s promised to rebuild both the team and its reputation, the first big front office hire of that new owner’s tenure, the young guy who’s got 4 World Series rings and is going to lead the team into the next generation…immediately gets caught up in a sexting scandal.
But this isn’t a Mets story.
It’s possible to say that this isn’t a Mets story because Jared Porter was a Cubs employee at the time, and the Cubs, who traded for domestic abuser Aroldis Chapman and supported domestic abuser Addison Russell until he got quite bad at baseball, have proven themselves to be wholly unable to discipline men for their actions against women. But that’s not really it either. The story isn’t about the Mets. It isn’t about the Cubs. It’s only barely about Jared Porter, a dime-a-dozen entitled man who believes that he has the right to a woman’s attention because he’s him and she’s pretty.
It’s about the woman who Jared Porter drove out of baseball, and all the other women driven out of baseball by all the other Jared Porters.
The woman, a reporter from a foreign country with a limited grasp of English, stopped covering baseball because Jared Porter thought she looked good, texted her trying to meet up, and when she stopped responding, sent a picture of his dick. She had already been uncomfortable and a little confused by the tone of the conversation, and stopped responding. He did not stop sending texts, and at one point sent her 62 consecutive unanswered texts, culminating in the dick pic.
After that, well, take it away, ESPN article:
She considered alerting the Cubs but said she was concerned about possible repercussions. That summer, she said, she had developed a serious sleeping problem and was wracked with anxiety about whether she had made the wrong decision in coming to the U.S. Eventually, the woman said, she told her bosses, who referred her to a lawyer and connected her with a Cubs employee from her home country.
The next year, Porter was with the Diamondbacks, and she declined to go to Arizona to cover them because she didn’t want to see him. After that, she went back home, stopped being a journalist, and went to work in finance.
This is how women are driven out of sports journalism. Now, this is one of the more extreme ways, but it’s on the same spectrum of sexism that holds women back. One time when I was covering the Giants, I overheard a conversation between an established female journalist and one working for a smaller outlet. The one working for the smaller outlet had applied for a better job covering the Giants, and not gotten the time of day. The job had gone to a man from out of town, and that was that. The more experienced reporter nodded. She’d seen it before. She knew she’d see it again.
The system is made to do this. Sure, there will be tut-tutting at Porter in particular, and by the time this goes up he might even be fired, but there won’t be any culture change that comes about from his behavior, no industry-wide reckoning. It’ll just be another bad thing that happened, a footnote in Mets history: Hey, remember that GM who was fired after a month for sending a dick pic?
And meanwhile, one more woman chose another job, convinced that she didn’t have a place in baseball. She was probably right. The Cubs have been very clear on their antipathy towards women, and a then-Cubs employee just exemplified it. The sport could have let her have her place, treated her like a professional there to do a job. Instead, she’s gone, too worried about judgment back home to even put her name on the story. Hopefully the next woman will have it a little better, but let’s not hold our breath on that one.