New York Mets president of baseball operations Sandy Alderson is aiming to do a better job when it comes to vetting potential hires in the fallout of the team firing general manager Jared Porter who was discovered to have sent explicit, unsolicited texts and images he sent to a reporter in 2016 in a report from ESPN’s Jeff Passan and Mina Kimes.
Porter was fired on Tuesday morning following just one month with the team in the general manager role.
“This is a wake-up call,” Alderson said, according to ESPN’s Jesse Rogers. “It clearly suggests something like this can be out there in connection with almost anyone. We have do to our best to make sure we know about that information, but there are limits to what we can actually get.
“I don’t think this reflects a fundamental flaw in the process. I think this is a very unfortunate circumstance that we wish we knew about, but didn’t.”
Porter, 41, didn’t disclose his conducting during the interview process, and the vetting process raised no concerns regarding Porter.
“There really wasn’t a dissenting voice, so from my standpoint, I was shocked. Eventually that gives away to disappointment and a little bit of anger,” Alderson said. “There’s always a risk associated with hiring. There was no disclosure of this conduct. I don’t think we would have hired Jared if we had known about the conduct beforehand. Should we have known? We did a background check. We asked if there was anything else we need to know.”
“To my knowledge, none of the other organizations that Jared was employed with knew about this, either,” he continued.
Alderson did say that the team did not speak with any women during the process, but Alderson cites a lack of female executives in the game as a reason for their lack of availability.
“There was not one single recommendation from a woman and that’s a reflection of the demographics of the game today in the front offices,” Alderson said. “That says something very loudly.”
“This is a club responsibility,” he said. “We have to do whatever we think is necessary to ensure that we’re hiring well-vetted employees. What this situation suggests is we need to rethink what constitutes well-vetted.”
The Mets won’t replace Porter in the near term, and assistant general manager Zack Scott will assist Alderson and others to handle general manager duties.
Alderson vowed to “change the culture” of the club during a Zoom call with 400 Mets employees on Tuesday morning.
“When I came here my goal was to put a good team on the field and change the culture,” Alderson said. “It wasn’t just about what’s right. I said to myself, ‘What do Mets employees expect?'”
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