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.
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 20th 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.
