Baseball, Sexual Harassment

Lawsuit Sez Baseball Team Sucks At Baseball, Life

It's not shocking to believe that any obstacles she encountered stemmed from incompetence in the front office and on the field. What is shocking are the allegations detailing the verbal and emotional abuse Castergine took from Wilpon and those acting under his management....

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Mets. Incompetent? Sexist? Both?

These are the questions asked in a new lawsuit filed yesterday in the Eastern District of New York. In fairness, the first question shouldn’t really be a question assuming a passing understanding of baseball since, say, 1986. I guess there was the year that the NL sent them up to get hammered into submission by the Yankees (who let them win a game!), but no one writes epic songs about cannon fodder. If you haven’t been following the ongoing train wreck of the damned that is the New York Mets, don’t fret, this new complaint can bring you up to speed.

Because the best part of the complaint is its blistering account of just how bad the Mets are at the whole “baseball” thing.

A former Mets executive, Leigh Castergine, is suing the Mets and Jeff Wilpon, the Chief Operating Officer for discrimination, retaliation, and a violation of the Family and Medical Leave Act. Castergine was charged with boosting ticket sales, so a substantial question surrounding her dismissal will be whether she was a failure at her job or whether she was set up to fail.

It’s not shocking to believe that any obstacles she encountered stemmed from incompetence in the front office and on the field.

What is shocking are the allegations detailing the verbal and emotional abuse Castergine took from Wilpon and those acting under his management….

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If Castergine fails in her lawsuit, she can succeed in writing the definitive insider account of sporting failure.

Castergine faced significant challenges in her new job. First and foremost, the team had not made the playoffs since 2006 and had come off two straight losing seasons…Moreover, the team had not been able to acquire premier talent, in part, because of its serious financial woes…The team had either traded away or failed to re-sign some of its marquee players and biggest fan attractions, including the 2011 National League batting champion Jose Reyes and 2012 National League Cy Young Award winner R.A. Dickey.

The Team’s ownership and front office have only made things worse. For example, Mets’ executives persisted in publicly denying the Team’s financial difficulties despite the obvious freefall in player payroll, further frustrating the team’s fanbase. Indeed, each season the Mets’ front office insisted that the Team had the ability to spend money on new players, only to see payroll drop even further. Some fans had become so disenchanted that they pledged not to attend any games until there was a change in ownership. Others compared Castergine’s job to selling “deck chairs on the [T]itanic” or “tickets to the funeral.”

Financial difficulties? Like, casting your financial lot with Bernie Madoff? Actually, this complaint makes the Madoff story so much more understandable.

Prior to Castergine’s arrival [in 2010], the Mets collected data on index cards.

Critical evaluation of NAV letters was clearly out of their reach.

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The team also routinely bad mouthed their own organization in public — even though this only highlighted their own monumental failures — and jacked up ticket prices to match the crosstown Yankees who didn’t notice that their backward little brother had comparatively made Yankees tickets look like a steal because the Yankees are too busy winning games to worry about that stuff. At least in most years. This year the Yankees are too busy producing the Yankeeography about every gift basket Derek Jeter ever handed out. Did you realize he was retiring? The Yankees would like to remind you that DEREK JETER IS RETIRING!

It’s hard to believe the Mets crackerjack management team haven’t been able to get things together on the field. Enter Castergine, the embodiment of the adage “you don’t sell the steak, you sell the sizzle” because, trust me, there’s no “steak” in watching David Wright collect $19 million to bat .269. By her own account, Castergine was pretty good at her job, and it seems like the Mets front office appreciated her efforts to get warm bodies in the seats.

That is until she got pregnant. Castergine wasn’t married and she claims that didn’t sit well with Jeff Wilpon. According to Vice Sports:

Despite working for the Mets, Castergine excelled at her job, receiving bonuses triggered by ticket sale goals. Regardless of her effectiveness, Jeffrey Wilpon systematically humiliated her when she became pregnant according to the complaint.

The complaint alleges that Wilpon told a colleague that he is “old fashioned and thinks (Castergine) should be married before having a baby.” Wilpon would mockingly check her hand for an engagement ring before meetings and provide rules regarding her pregnancy, such as “don’t touch her belly and don’t ask how she’s doing; she’s not sick she’s pregnant.”

Haven’t you heard, Jeff? No one in the Mets front office knows how to put a ring on anything. Look, Wilpon’s alleged behavior at this point danced up to the good-natured, if still completely inappropriate, ribbing. He absolutely shouldn’t be doing any of this, but this could just be creepy awkward uncle stuff.

It gets worse. Castergine collapsed during a meeting and found out she had intrahepatic cholestasis of pregnancy and had to have her labor induced lest she deliver a stillborn. When she returned to work and attended a meeting to discuss a potential advertising campaign with an e-cigarette company, Wilpon allegedly said in the presence of Castergine and several other executives, “I am as morally opposed to putting an e-cigarette sign in my ballpark as I am to [Castergine] having this baby without being married.”

What’s wrong with an e-cigarette? It’s designed specifically to be healthier than the alternative. The Mets proudly display advertising for Budweiser, Subway, and Fox News, and all three are more likely to kill a fan than an e-cig. Regardless, so much for the well-meaning but awkward stuff, these allegations suggest Wilpon blew past that line and kept on going into the downright, no-one-in-this-century-can-think-this-is-OK territory of telling executives that he, the Chief Operating Officer, was morally opposed to her life.

Unfortunately, Castergine alleges that Wilpon’s influence carried over to the rest of the management. Instead of doing something about the problem, the HR Director advised Castergine to quit. That would seem like a complete failure by most standards, but probably earned HR a 3-year, $10 million extension.

Castergine claims the Mets cited numerous “issues” with her performance that not only came out of the blue, but almost exclusively addressed screw-ups that happened while she was out on maternity leave. They offered her a severance package on the condition that she never sue them for… well, presumably the exact behavior she’s now suing them over. When she balked, they terminated her outright.

It’s hard not to read this complaint with sympathy for Castergine. Blaming a marketer for failing to sell tickets to this tire fire of an organization rings a bit hollow. And her depiction of the harassment she got in the office is sadly very believable. Perhaps the Mets truly are both incompetent and sexist. Castergine is well-represented by lawyer Anne Vladeck, who you might remember from the Knicks sexual harassment suit or the Ropes & Gray suit alleging age and sexual discrimination.

And this is a question for Elie, who is a die-hard Mets fan with a young son: How can anyone raise a Mets fan today? It’s been 28 years since the team was reasonably good. At this point, the children of those fans who rooted for the 86 Mets are now having children themselves.

Three generations of Mets fans are enough.

The complaint in full is available on the next page….

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