Imagine for one moment an otherwise bright child who's made mistakes as most children make, bright or otherwise. He comes home from whatever he was doing with his friends, but he discovers an old incident he thought passed without notice or consequence was now unearthed, and his father demands accountability.
Let's say it was something like giving a push back to that cute but obnoxious little girl who decided the way to make friends and attract the opposite sex was to push, shove, or even punch. He took it long enough because he was taught young gentlemen do not push, shove, or punch young ladies, but he finally got fed up with this particular chick who didn't know the meaning of the words "knock it off."
Nobody was truly harmed. It's not as though she'd shoved him out of third-story windows, it's not as though he finally dragged her to the nearest open window on the sixth floor. But somebody, who knows whom, let the ancient push back slip within his father's earshot, and Dad confronts him subsequently giving him minus two seconds to explain himself.
Aware that the conversation is about a comparatively ancient error, he gives the deets straight, no chaser, certain that no father in his right mind would even think about punitive action regarding such a cobwebbed misstep. But he discovers the hard way how wrong he is when Dad pounces, pronounces him grounded for the rest of the forthcoming month, and fans his behind rather mercilessly for an exclamation point.
The boy repairs to his room with more than just a chastened ego and a very sore bottom. He's between rage and sorrow because it was only a foolish mistake, not exactly the crime of the season. He pushed back after taking it long enough, but it didn't make him any less a young gentleman or prove he had murder in his heart.
You might want to contemplate that when you wonder whether the Mets went a few bridges too far firing general manager Jared Porter Tuesday morning — almost a fortnight after he and the Mets delivered the trade of the winter bringing Francisco Lindor and Carlos Carrasco aboard — over infractions he committed while he was the Cubs' director of professional scouting four years ago.
Our hypothetical push-back kid merely responded in kind at long enough last. Porter wasn't pushed. He sent, shall we say, naughty/nasty sexual images among 62 text messages to a young woman working as a reporter whose only provocation, if we can call it that, was exchanging business cards on the pretext of coming discussion about international baseball scouting.
The lady discovered the hard way that Porter had amorous designs upon her and didn't readily take "no" for an answer or ignorance as a subtle hint. She was a foreign correspondent come to the United States for the first time, assigned specifically to cover the Show. She had no idea going in that she'd run into more than a few Porter screwballs on the low inside corner.
"The text relationship started casually before Porter, then the Chicago Cubs director of professional scouting, began complimenting her appearance, inviting her to meet him in various cities and asking why she was ignoring him," say ESPN writers Mina Kimes and Jeff Passan. "And the texts show she had stopped responding to Porter after he sent a photo of pants featuring a bulge in the groin area."
Kimes and Passan say ESPN knew of the Porter texts to her in December 2017 and thought about reporting them until she told the network she feared her career would be harmed. She has since left journalism, though Kimes and Passan say she's kept in touch with ESPN concurrently and went public only under anonymous cover, fearing backlash in her home country.
"My number one motivation is I want to prevent this from happening to someone else," she's quoted as saying. "Obviously, [Porter]'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.
"I know in the U.S., there is a women's empowerment movement. But in [my home country], it's still far behind," she continued. "Women get dragged through the mud [in my country] if your name is associated with any type of sexual scandal. Women are the ones who get fingers pointed at them. I don't want to go through the victimization process again. I don't want other people to blame me."
The Mets hired Porter in December, from the Diamondbacks, for whom he worked as an assistant GM since 2017. On Monday night, Porter told ESPN that yes, he'd texted with her, but no, he hadn't sent any pictures, until he was told their exchanges included selfies and other images, at which point he said, "the more explicit ones are not of me. Those are like, kinda like joke-stock images."
Mets owner Steve Cohen isn't exactly laughing, tweeting Tuesday morning, "We have terminated Jared Porter this morning. 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." Especially since, speaking metaphorically, the lady didn't exactly push, shove, or punch Porter first all those years ago.
The Athletic's Ken Rosenthal says the lady had an ally in a baseball player from her home country, who helped her create a rather forceful message to Porter back when that Porter didn't exactly heed at first: "This is extremely inappropriate, very offensive, and getting out of line. Could you please stop sending offensive photos or msg." He's said to have apologized to her much later.
"Colleagues of mine who are women use words such as 'tired' and 'exhausted' to describe their daily struggle to be treated the same as men, to command the same respect when they walk into a clubhouse, to do their jobs without facing sexual provocation," Rosenthal adds. "They are professionals, not playthings."
It's one thing to ask a lady for a date. It's another thing to try your best to change her mind if she says "no." But turning from there to hot pursuit sexting is something entirely different and disturbing.
The Mets were unaware of Porter's sexually explicit hot pursuit until Monday. They cut Porter loose early enough the morning after. A 7:30 AM Eastern time firing happens when enough New Yorkers have barely finished coffee at the breakfast table before rumbling out hoping for just a little more snooze on the subway before work.
Some think the Mets could have been aware of Porter's old lewd hot pursuit sooner. Some think Cohen and company have surrendered to cancel culture, to which Cohen had a reply when one indignant tweeter demanded to know Porter's path to redemption "now that his life has been ruined."
"I have no idea," Cohen replied, though surely he knows Porter's redemption is likelier to come away from baseball than within it, as second chances so often do. "I have an organization of 400 employees that matter more than any one individual. No action [taken] would set a poor example to the culture I'm trying to build."
A subsequent tweeter isolated a parallel point addressed directly to the demand for a path to redemption: "As someone who is 100% opposed to cancel culture, this is a ridiculous thing to say. Jared brought this on himself. His path to redemption is on him. This has nothing to do with cancel culture."
Others think the Mets in the Cohen era have now become the essence of decisive action when made aware of such wrongdoing. The joke is kind of like on Porter now. But nobody's laughing.
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