Reese Kaplan -- To Not Know, To Know and Ignore, To Repeat Behavior...

 

Sandy Alderson is a well respected front office professional among most pundits who follow the game of baseball, but the more the stories come to the surface about some of his hires, the luster on his formerly fine reputation is going to need some major polishing.

Yesterday news came out that Mickey Callaway was not just flirting openly and disregarding the sanctity of his marriage, but he was sending inappropriate text messages, photographs and engaging in highly suspicious and creepy dialog with women he encountered in the front office, at the ballpark and wherever he happened to meet them.  It got so bad in Cleveland that his behavior earned the nickname of “the Mickey treatment” for how he manipulated women on social media sites.

Apparently his behavior came to the notice of the Cleveland minor league organization as far back as 2010 when he was working as a developmental pitching instructor for the would-be Indians working their way up the ladder.  It was very well known and continued unabated.  One of his ex girlfriends revealed that he tried to rekindle a physical relationship just two days before his 2011 wedding.

 
As much as people criticize Sandy Alderson for his lack of background depth in checking out his potential hire, Callaway’s actions were so well known that Mets employees came to refer to him as “Dick Pic Mick.”  It seems even worse that other people on the Mets payroll were aware of how inappropriate Mickey Callaway was behaving, yet the front office saw no problem whatsoever with the man they hired to be a rookie manager.

The Callaway peccadilloes were so well known that Cleveland Indians’ President of Baseball Operations Chris Antonetti, GM Mike Chernoff and Manager Terry Francona were approached by the husband of a woman with whom he was having an affair.  The relationship ended and Cleveland even issued a press release about it.  For Alderson to claim not to have known about Callaway’s behavior rings at best untrue and at worst uninformed. 

Of course, Indians’ top executive Antonetti was just as bad, claiming he was totally unaware of any misbehavior by Callaway when he was a part of the team.  It was he who put out the statement in 2017 about Callaway’s affair and now a dozen Indians employees have come forward to add more detail and allege that the aggressive and sexually charged communications from Callaway were out in the open for all in the Indians organization to know. 

What makes it even worse is that the same wronged husband of the woman with whom Callaway was having the affair in 2017 emailed the Mets about Mickey Callaway’s actions in 2018.  To be fair, Alderson was at that time in August of 2018 receiving treatment for his health issues and was not actively in the front office, but it calls into question what the folks allocated to cover his duties did with this information?  It doesn’t appear they took any action at all.

In addition, five more women in sports media have come forth since that 2017 press-worthy incident to detail actions by Callaway.  Even more who worked directly for Cleveland have added to the pile of charges against Callaway as well which makes the Mets’ alleged ignorance of character questions even more difficult to accept.

Callaway has admitted to part of what has surfaced.  He recently wrote, “While much of the reporting around my behavior has been inaccurate, the truth is that on multiple occasions I have been unfaithful to my wife, and for that, I am deeply sorry. What I have never done is use my position to harass or pressure a woman. I am confident that I have never engaged in anything that was non-consensual.”

Hmmn…so he’s proud of being unfaithful, but now is blaming the women towards whom he engaged in private types of communication in that they were asking for it?  Didn’t that kind of blame-the-victim mantra towards wronged women go out of fashion in the 20^th century? 

Add in the recent Jared Porter and Ryan Ellis terminations, it would appear that the Mets were rife with these kinds of problems.  The Ellis situation does tie to Alderson since it first occurred in 2018 as does the hire of Jared Porter.  That’s a triumvirate of poor selections that certainly suggest that Alderson is well behind the curve when it comes to proper pre-hire background checking as well as on-the-job monitoring of inappropriate behavior.