It had been one of the few Mets offseasons with a glow. A new owner who, at least at the moment, wants to run the team like it should be run. The acquisition of possibly the most fun player in the league in Francisco Lindor. But this is the Mets, and stepping on a rake is never more than two strides away for them throughout their history.
Mina Kimes and Jeff Passan broke the story last night that GM Jared Porter, when working as the Cubs’ director of professional scouting in 2016, harassed a foreign female reporter, sending her over 60 unanswered texts and then thinking the coup-de-sleazebag of sending a pic of his erect dick would be the one to get her to turn her head in his direction.
Here’s a snippet from the ESPN’s piece by Kimes and Passan:
Porter continued texting her anyway, sending dozens of messages despite the lack of a response. On Aug. 11, 2016, a day after asking her to meet him at a hotel in Los Angeles, Porter sent the woman 17 pictures. The first 15 photos were of the hotel and its restaurants. The 16th was the same as an earlier photo of the bulge in the pants. The 17th was of a bare penis.
Not long after the news of these texts broke, new Mets owner Steve Cohen did the right thing by firing Porter, making the announcement via Twitter, stating “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.”
I could go on from here about just how inappropriate this is, how frightening it can be, how if a woman wants to see a pic of your johnson, she’ll tell you, about how this kind of repeated badgering can easily go from a sense of entitlement, to attention, to a scary sense of ownership, and everything else. But you don’t need me to, because you’ve read it all before. You’ve read this story dozens of times. There had been some half-step for baseball this winter in the right direction, with Kim Ng being named Marlins GM. This kind of story makes it clear the still-scum bucket world that she will move into.
Manfred should now make a call to his star new consultant Theo Epstein, and ask him why this went on in his front office and what he knew about it. While Epstein has positioned himself on the liberal side of a lot of issues, the Cubs front-office under him always had a seedy underbelly of frat-boy behavior, including a pretty close relationship with BarfStool that nearly led to one of their writers conducting the 7th-inning stretch before that was waved off at the last minute, that easily could have fostered this kind of horridness.
On to the actual games, and putting too much weight into an early-season clash between two of the NBA’s best is always a dicey proposition. Injuries, schedules, level of give-a-shit can always waver during a season and not give you a true sense. Still, Milwaukee and Brooklyn playing last night felt like it had a certain spice. And in Brooklyn’s 125-123 victory, the Bucks might have gotten a sobering look at what awaits them when this matchup really matters. And that’s a Nets team that didn’t have Kyrie Irving.
The Bucks showed some gumption in coming back from 10 down in the second half, but with the game on the line, the Nets were able to float seamlessly between Harden possessions, Durant possessions, and then nifty ball-movement possessions. The Bucks had no answers.
Meanwhile, with a chance to take the lead/win the game in their last two possessions, the best the Bucks and coach Mike Budenholzer could come up with was keeping Giannis Antentokounmpo 20 feet from the ball while Khris Middleton heaved up shots among and through two defenders that had him more smothered and covered than Waffle House.
That doesn’t mean this is what it’s going to look like come June or July, whenever they actually play. Harden and Durant are playing nice now, but they still have some downtime to get through. Irving still needs to be fit in. Budenholzer still has some months to figure out that the regular season doesn’t matter all that much and he might want to develop a Plan B for the first time in three years.
Still, the Nets have all those options. The Bucks have yet to prove what they’ll do when a team sets up the red-rover line at the stripe on defense to prevent Giannis from driving to the hoop unescorted and doesn’t have kickout options, or when the ball isn’t in his hands at all. Middleton is a great player. He’s not whichever two-of-three that aren’t the Nets’ first-option that night. Until the Bucks answer that, they still look like they’ll be just good enough to break your heart.
Isn’t it always cute when a son takes after his dad?
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