By Mike Steffanos January 21, 2021
I wrote a post yesterday on the Jared Porter firing. I not only believe the Mets did the right thing by firing him, I think it was their only possible move once all of the facts came out. The type of behavior that the man engaged in was not only morally indefensible, but also showed such an extreme lack of judgement that essentially disqualified him from any possibility of staying in such an important position. A friend of mine asked me if I thought it mattered that Porter's toxic interaction with the female journalist happened a few years ago. The guy was in his mid-30s at the time, hardly a kid, and the actions were way beyond inappropriate, so no.
Some in the media have found fault with the Mets for not digging this dirt up when they were vetting Porter, but this incident had been buried pretty well until the woman decided to come forward with it. I think a side effect of this whole fiasco is that it's quite possible teams will go to more extreme vetting with their top front office jobs, what Sandy Alderson described as FBI level background checks. Even so, there are still limits to what you can do. You'd hope that the example of Porter would serve to discourage men from using their position of power in that manner in the future for fear of their own careers being derailed, and that candidates who have something dark in their past would shy away from taking highly visible positions. But everyone has secrets, some bigger and darker than others, and there's always a potential to be embarrassed by an employee who wasn't candid about a past they've done a decent job of hiding.
Back to the Mets, Sandy Alderson indicated the club would not be filling the GM job in the short term, which makes sense. Even if you could identify someone you wish to hire, teams aren't going to want to let someone go who holds a key position in their organization this close to the season. He did mention that there would be some clarification on the front office situation this week, something which we're still waiting to happen. My initial thoughts on the consequences of Porter's firing from the Mets point of view was the loss of the unique skill set that he brought to the job. In a piece in the New York Post yesterday, Joel Sherman summarized this pretty well, quoting Alderson from the press conference:
"One of the things we will be lacking is sort of the same breadth of contacts and information that we were able to get through Jared. Jared has lots of contacts in the game — not just at the GM level, but at the assistant GM level and below. That's a rich source of information and can lead to smaller deals that fill out our roster. That is an area we are going to have to pick it up."
As Sherman points out, there is no one in the front office now who has the level of contacts around the game that Porter posseted, and this is not a strength of Alderson himself. This is going to be a problem going forward. Sherman suggests that in the short term the Mets look to hire some advisors to fill this deficiency. I think that something along these lines would be the smart move right now, getting the Mets into next offseason where they could hire a replacement for Porter without handicapping themselves in the meantime.
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