Southpaw 18: Bad Day to be a Bear
Bowdoin's own Jared Porter proves elite institutions won't save baseball.
Dear Readers,
It’s been quite the week. One of us (Calder) turned 24, officially entering those “mid-twenties” that we keep hearing about. In more somber news, Henry Louis Aaron, one of the greatest baseball players to ever live, died this week at the age of 86. The list of Hall of Famers who have died in the last 12 months is staggering—in addition to Aaron, we’ve lost Tom Seaver, Lou Brock, Bob Gibson, Whitey Ford, Tommy Lasorda, and Phil Niekro. These titans were part of likely the last generation of baseball players who ruled the world of sports. There are many lovely obituaries of Aaron that we’ve shared at the conclusion of the newsletter, but this week, we’ve chosen to write about a much more ignominious baseball character: the short-lived General Manager of the New York Mets and Bowdoin alumnus, Jared Porter. Exactly half of the Southpaw duo is a diehard Mets fan, and we both went to and were happy at Bowdoin, so Porter’s conduct, which we’ll get into below, is personally disappointing. Unfortunately, it’s not especially surprising.
-Calder and Ian
Jared Porter Proves Elite Institutions Can’t Save Baseball
In the past two decades, baseball’s front offices have undergone a transformation. Spurred by the analytics and sabermetrics revolution (which some readers might be familiar with from Michael Lewis’s book Moneyball and the Aaron Sorkin/Steve Zaillian film adaptation starring Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill), general managers and team presidents have begun hiring executives not from the long roster of former ballplayers but from elite schools that churn out statistics whizzes.
Slowly, front offices have started looking less like baseball’s clubhouses and more like Princeton eating clubs. According to a recent report by ESPN, in 2001, 24% of the top baseball operations jobs were held by graduates of colleges and universities listed in the top 25 spots on the U.S. News and World Report’s list. By 2020 that number had risen to 67%. Unsurprisingly, this rise in the number of alumni from elite universities has not precipitated a concomitant rise in diversity among top operations jobs. In 2020, about 90% of baseball’s front offices were led by white men, as has been the case for the past two decades. In the interim, MLB has simply swapped out white male former ballplayers for white male Ivy Leaguers.
The popular narrative around the sabermetrics revolution posits that the influx of elite, college-educated executives has made baseball a smarter—if not more interesting—sport. According to this same narrative, the geekization of baseball has corresponded with a taming of the sport’s raunchier, more chauvinistic impulses. Despite manifold evidence to the contrary, Americans still erroneously believe that men who have achieved a higher degree of education are less likely to commit sexual assault that their less educated peers, leading baseball fans to conclude that higher proportion of Ivy Leaguers in clubhouses and front offices has brought about about a decrease in the frequency of sexual harassment, assault, and ambient misogyny in those same offices.
All of this brings us to Jared Porter. Porter was the General Manager of the New York Mets for all of 36 days until January 19 when ESPN reported that he had sent 62 consecutive unanswered text messages to a female reporter, including an unwanted picture of his penis. Owner Steve Cohen and head of baseball operations Sandy Alderson fired Porter the next morning.
The popular narrative of baseball’s twenty-first century evolution would lead you to believe that Porter’s behavior is somehow an embarrassing aberration from the new norm. On paper, Porter is the perfect poster child for the new front-office elite. A white man from Boston, he earned his undergraduate degree from Bowdoin College, the fine institution of higher learning that both of us claim as our alma mater. He entered professional baseball in 2002, the same year that Billy Beane (of Moneyball fame) sparked the sabermetric revolution. He climbed the ranks of MLB’s front offices by building saber-tastic teams, most notably as the director of professional scouting for the 2016 World Champion Chicago Cubs.
While public health statistics don’t always track educational attainment, there is no statistical reason to believe that Porter’s elite pedigree makes him any less likely to commit sexual harassment than any of his non-elite colleagues. On the other hand, there’s ample evidence to suggest that his elite education made him more likely to get a high-powered job in an MLB front office. In the days since the ESPN report, a number of women in sports have written powerfully about their own experiences with sexual harassment and misogyny in the new, supposedly enlightened front office environment. As Deesha Thosar, the Mets beat reporter for the New York Daily News, wrote in a column, very few female reporters were surprised by the revelation about Porter. “For many, Porter’s outrageous behavior may seem unthinkable, being so far removed from their everyday experience,” Thosar wrote. “For women who work in professional environments like baseball, without the luxury of never having to think about these situations in their own lives, Porter’s methodology was familiar, if extreme. For me, it hit home.”
Porter’s behavior is similarly unsurprising for anyone who has spent time in places like Bowdoin—elite, majority-white educational institutions populated by a disproportionately high number of rich student athletes from New England. At the end of the day, neither of us are particularly demographically different from Porter. Like Porter, who attended the elite Thayer Academy before matriculating at Bowdoin to play varsity hockey and baseball, we attended elite prep schools in New York City and Washington, D.C. before enrolling at Bowdoin. While we were not varsity athletes like Porter, we did, by virtue of our race and class background, enjoy many of the privileges and advantages that Porter enjoyed. After eight collective years at the college, we can confidently say that there is very little in Bowdoin’s curriculum or culture that would discouraged behavior like Porter’s. To the contrary, the prevailing ethos of white entitlement and male, athletic chauvinism goes a long way toward encouraging it.
We do not purport to know Porter’s politics, but we do know firsthand that a healthy slice of the student body at Bowdoin College—including significant segments of the baseball and hockey teams—subscribe to a politics of white grievance that casts any challenge to the unlimited societal privileges of white men as an intolerable affront to what they solipsistically call “liberal values.” In the spring of 2016, after a bias incident on campus, a white baseball player and Massachusetts prep school graduate named Dickie Arms wrote to the campus newspaper to complain about the chiding that students got from the administration. Five years after its publication, the piece offers prescient insight into the sort of white grievance politics that have become the foundation of parts of the right. Arms claimed that his reactionary politics made him a political target on campus which was hell-bent on oppressing rich white men and stripping them of their rights. The piece evinces the same sort of willful blindness toward legitimate claims of oppression that Trump turned into a powerful political weapon. “I have never been offended in my life. I really don’t know what being offended means,” Arms wrote.
Arms’s broader thesis—that rich white men should be able to say and do whatever they want, whenever they want, and without reproach also helps to explain—but not justify—Porter’s behavior. Our time on the Bowdoin campus suggests that this foundational belief in white, male impunity is baked into the culture of elite colleges and universities. While we don’t personally know Arms or Porter, we can conclusively say that elite institutions will not save America—or its national pastime. Their graduates, ourselves included, have their own sets of problems. And while baseball’s statistical revolution is here to stay, the sport needs to realize that the ability to operate Excel doesn’t alone make one virtuous.
Go Deeper:
This week, many women in sports media shared personal stories about sexual harassment in the industry and how Jared Porter is not a lone creep:
“Baseball cannot be surprised by Jared Porter” by Deesha Thosar in the New York Daily News (January 19, 2021).
“Mets' blind spot with Jared Porter highlights problems women face in sports” by Laura Albanese in Newsweek (January 23, 2021).
“Boys will be boys? Men like Jared Porter are driven by entitlement and stupidity” by Helene Elliot in the Los Angeles Times (January 21, 2021).
RODNEY’S ROUNDUP
Do you want to read about . . .
. . . a complete obituary of Hank Aaron? “Hank Aaron, Home Run King Who Defied Racism, Dies at 86” by Richard Goldstein in The New York Times (January 22, 2021).
. . . beautiful thoughts on Aaron and personal stories from his biographer? “Let us appreciate the grace and uncommon decency of Henry Aaron” by Howard Bryant in ESPN (January 23, 2021).
. . . something completely different, a farcical sendup of the NBA’s COVID protocol? “The NBA's New COVID-19 Protocol” by Harris Mayersohn in The New Yorker (January 21, 2021).