Last night, ESPN reported that now-former New York Mets general manager Jared Porter sent unsolicited, explicit text messages and pictures to a woman reporter in 2016. Of those messages, over 60 were unanswered — one of which included a picture of his “erect, naked penis”. Porter’s appalling behavior is hardly an aberration; it’s emblematic of a culture that has been cultivated for over 100 years. Major League Baseball has a long-standing issue of choosing violence against women, and clearly, it hasn’t gotten any better.
I choose those words carefully. Baseball itself isn’t the problem.