Porter Incident Points to Crying Need for MLB to Hire Advocate for Women
By Ken Reed
What former New York Mets general manager did to a female reporter is despicable. He certainly deserved to be fired after admitting to sending dozens of explicit text messages and photos to a female reporter in 2016.
The sad part is almost everyone inside baseball — most notably women in baseball — know this wasn’t an isolated sexual harassment incident. Far from it.
“In my fifth year working in baseball, I’ve lost count of how many sexist comments have been made directly to me while working,” says Deesha Thosar, a Mets reporter for the New York Daily News.
Sure, these type of incidents unfortunately happen in all industries in this society. But they are more prevalent in SportsWorld, which historically has been dominated by males, too many of whom are in a state of arrested development at the adolescent stage. And I’m not just talking about the players.
“It’s so exhausting,” says Molly Knight, a senior writer for The Athletic who has covered baseball for 15 years.
“It’s executives; it’s players; it’s PR people; it’s writers. It’s everywhere. It’s the culture.”
Yes, it’s the culture. Sexual conquest has long been part of the male sports culture, especially in baseball where players spend so much time on the road. To be sure, not everyone in baseball is a sexual predator, far from it.
But this is a cultural issue within the sport that needs to be addressed. Culture change experts say it takes seven years to change a culture, and that’s if the key leaders and influencers in the culture are on board with a comprehensive change effort.
Baseball needs a serious culture change initiative and it needs to be led by commissioner Rob Manfred, and truly embraced by every owner and senior executive in the game. It has to be more than someone from the PR department talking to the players in spring training and saying “These are things you shouldn’t do” while most of the players look at their phones.
Step One should be the appointment of a highly respected woman, who has been in the game for multiple years, to the position of advocate for women in baseball (exact title to be worked out later). This person would be a trusted go-to resource for any woman in the game who is dealing with a sexual harassment problem or a gender discrimination issue of any type.
“You wonder how many people have left the business because they didn’t want to deal with it, especially if they’re young or just starting out,” says Knight. “They might have an incident and think ‘Yep, this is not for me.’”
It’s time for baseball to start extracting itself from the Stone Age.
— Ken Reed, Sports Policy Director, League of Fans

Sports Forum Podcast
Episode #28 – League of Fans’ Sports Forum podcast: A Chat With Mano Watsa, a Leading Basketball and Life Educator – Watsa is President of PGC Basketball, the largest education basketball camp in the world, with over 150 camps in 30+ U.S. states and Canada. We discuss problems in youth sports today, including single sport specialization, the growing gap between the “haves” and “have-nots,” the high drop-out rate in competitive sports, and the growing mental health challenges young athletes are dealing with today.
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Episode #27 – League of Fans’ Sports Forum podcast: Kids’ Sports: How We Can Take Back the Game and Restore Quality Family Time In the Process – Linda Flanagan is author of “Take Back the Game: How Money and Mania Are Ruining Kids’ Sports and Why It Matters.” We discuss how commercialized and professionalized youth sports are hurting kids and their families.
Episode #26 – League of Fans’ Sports Forum podcast: How Can We Fix Youth Sports? – John O’Sullivan is Founder and CEO of Changing the Game Project and author of “Changing the Game: The Parents Guide to Raising Happy, High Performing Athletes and Giving Youth Sports Back to Our Kids.”
Episode #25 – League of Fans’ Sports Forum podcast: Physical Education Should Be a Critical Component of K-12 School Design – Michael Horn is co-founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation.
Episode #24 – League of Fans’ Sports Forum podcast: Mental Health and Athletes: Ending the Stigma – Nathan Braaten and Taylor Ricci are the founders of Dam Worth It, a non-profit created to end the stigma around mental health at colleges and universities through sport, storytelling, and community creation.
Episode #23 – League of Fans’ Sports Forum podcast: Olympian Benita Fitzgerald Mosley Talks Title IX, Youth Sports and the Olympics.
Media
"How We Can Save Sports" author Ken Reed appears on Fox & Friends to explain how there's "too much adult in youth sports."
Ken Reed appears on Mornings with Gail from KFKA Radio in Colorado to discuss bad parenting in youth athletics.
“Should College Athletes Be Paid?” Ken Reed on The Morning Show from Wisconsin Public Radio
Ken Reed appears on KGNU Community Radio in Colorado (at 02:30) to discuss equality in sports and Title IX.
Ken Reed appears on the Ralph Nader Radio Hour (at 38:35) to discuss his book The Sports Reformers: Working to Make the World of Sports a Better Place, and to talk about some current sports issues.
- League of Fans Sports Policy Director Ken Reed quoted in Washington Post column titled "What happened to P.E.? It’s losing ground in our push for academic improvement," by Jay Mathews
League of Fans is a sports reform project founded by Ralph Nader to fight for the higher principles of justice, fair play, equal opportunity and civil rights in sports; and to encourage safety and civic responsibility in sports industry and culture.
Vanderbilt Sport & Society - On The Ball with Andrew Maraniss with guest Ken Reed, Sports Policy Director for League of Fans and author of How We Can Save Sports: A Game Plan
Sports & Torts – Ken Reed, Sports Policy Director, League of Fans – at the American Museum of Tort Law
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