Lawsuit alleges Mets fired executive for being single mom

With very few exceptions, the debate over the New York Mets’ owners exists along a fairly short spectrum. On one end is the possibility that principal owner and CEO Fred Wilpon and his son and team COO Jeff Wilpon are replacement-level plutocrats -- mostly mediocre, definitely self-important and self-sentimentalizing, not especially honest, but not uniquely dishonest -- in other words, not significantly below the prevailing local standard for blowhardy rich guys. That is the more charitable end of the spectrum.

The other side sounds a bit more like the situation described by Leigh Castergine, fired from her position as the Mets director of marketing and ticket sales last month, in a federal sex discrimination suit against the Mets organization and Jeff Wilpon. In Castergine’s complaint, which you can read here, the Mets owners are not just grandiose and hapless, but actively, bullyingly backwards. The allegations of sexism and workplace ugliness in the complaint are, sadly, probably not unique to the Mets; that Castergine was the first female VP in the Mets’ 52 years of existence is shameful, too.

But what is unique, and uniquely Mets, about the allegations is that the hostile work environment Castergine describes is so spectacularly unaccountable, petty, and unpleasant. It’s a locker room culture, at least in terms of the atmosphere of bro’ed-out exclusiveness and meatheaded norms, but this locker room is full of pissy old guys sitting around some diner, clucking endlessly about their nieces. This is from the New York Post’s recap of the suit:

“[Jeff Wilpon] frequently humiliated Castergine in front of others by, among other things, pretending to see if she had an engagement ring on her finger and openly stating in a meeting of the Team’s all-male senior executives that he is ‘morally opposed’ to Castergine ‘having this baby without being married,’” the suit states.

“Wilpon told her that, when she gets a ring, she will make more money and get a bigger bonus,” the suit states.

Castergine, as well she might have, complained to human resources about the treatment. Her suit alleges that Castergine was urged to quit by the team’s HR chief, and then was fired shortly thereafter. With all caveats noted -- this is just a lawsuit, the Mets have not commented on it, and so on -- if true, this is all pretty loathsome, and definitely illegal.

The window that the complaint opens onto the Mets organizational operations is predictably unflattering. Most notably, Castergine spearheaded the creation of a computerized database for Mets ticket sales, which had not previously existed, upon being hired in 2009; the team was still using a system based on index cards when Barack Obama was elected president for the first time. It’s also mostly beside the point, except to the extent that to show a front office that existed in a state of top-to-bottom cultural backwardness.

The Mets released a statement regarding the lawsuit.

“We have received and reviewed the complaint. The claims are without merit,” the Mets said, per Adam Rubin of ESPN New York. “Our organization maintains strong policies against any and all forms of discrimination.”

Atop this organization, with his crudity trickling down over it, is the heir to the team that Fred Wilpon has described as a family heirloom. Jeff Wilpon is described as carping relentlessly about Castergine’s marital status as she suffers through a difficult pregnancy. Relentlessly, and gratuitously: “I am as morally opposed to putting an e-cigarette sign in my ballpark,” Wilpon is alleged to have said in a Feb. 14 meeting with Castergine and other top team executives, “as I am to Leigh having this baby without being married.”

This scans less as a principled anti-vaping stance than it does an example of a petty bully whose workplace brutishness would inspire facepalms at Sterling Cooper Draper Price. That, as the suit alleges, no one at this meeting challenged Wilpon’s drive-by bullshit -- including the team’s general counsel, who presumably knew that he was witnessing something very much like workplace harassment -- suggests that the problem is bigger than one Peter-Principled son-of-a-boss. It is easy to disdain the Mets’ unaccountable and ass-backwards ownership from a distance, or by projecting it onto the opaque, screwy priorities that the team evinces; I know, I’ve done it myself. But that lack of accountability has manifestations and repercussions that are more difficult to stomach in this case.

If Castergine’s allegations are proven out, the right thing to do would be for the Mets to fire Jeff Wilpon. It is telling, in the worst possible way, that that outcome is significantly more difficult to imagine than anything in Castergine’s complaint. It seems so implausible for the same reasons that Castergine’s allegations are so easy to believe. The Wilpons have simply operated beyond accountability, and in persistently unaccountable ways, for so long that it is easier to imagine them authoring any crude, petty, chiseling offense -- very much including those alleged in Castergine’s complaint -- than it is to imagine them doing what’s necessary to make it right.