There was a fresh start Wednesday before noon in Washington, D.C., and there should be a desire for this to carry over to the American sports establishment, which kicked off this week with more embarrassment.
The topper came when ESPN baseball columnist Jeff Passan wrote a story that Jared Porter, recently hired as the 41-year-old general manager of the New York Mets, had an outrageous case of sexual harassment in his recent history.
The victim is a foreign journalist. She was covering Major League Baseball in 2016. She had the misfortune of being on an elevator with Porter, then the Chicago Cubs' director of pro scouting.
The journalist assumed an exchange of business cards meant that she could call for information. Instead, it led to dozens of texts and eventually a lewd photo from Porter wanting a meetup. The victim gave ESPN permission to go with the story, for which the sports outlet had the texts as proof. Porter was fired within hours of Passan's breaking news.
Adding to the Mets' embarrassment should be the recent story about new team owner Steve Cohen's nest of sexual harassment at his hedge fund, Point 72 Asset Management.
Porter lived in Wayzata until age 15 and then his family moved to Duxbury, Mass. He went to prep school there and then graduated from Bowdoin College.
Harvard, Yale and many less famous but nearly as expensive eastern colleges have taken over baseball front offices — starting with Yalie Theo Epstein winning the long-awaited World Series title for the Red Sox in 2004, as a 31-year-old general manager.
Another one of these guys, Cornell graduate Brian Taubman, was run off by the Astros (a precursor to a cheaters purge) for bellowing insults to female sportswriters in the Astros clubhouse in 2019.
