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Former Female MLB Reporter Tells It Like It Is

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As most baseball fans know by now, several top baseball executives and coaches have been fired recently for some horrific comments and even unwanted sexual advances towards female reporters and team staff members. But what many baseball fans might not know is just how prevalent this inappropriate – and unacceptable – behavior has been within ‘Our National Pastime.’

On Tuesday afternoon, Chelsea Janes, a Washington Nationals beat writer for The Washington Post from 2014 to 2018 and for whom she still works, took to Twitter to share a very detailed account of such experiences while she was on the Nationals beat.

Here is Chelsea’s complete post – verbatim and in paragraph form – which she posted in 17 consecutive tweets:

Knew I should take some time (and more than a few deep breaths) before trying to offer any thoughts on the Porter/Callaway situation, but it hit me that it’s fitting that a story like that broke on the day I jumped back into baseball because I haven’t known a day in a baseball clubhouse without a story like this.

My first day in an MLB clubhouse as a 20-year-old intern, a quad-A outfielder who will remain nameless had a coach pass me a piece of paper with his number on it. I had no idea what I was doing in the first place, so I immediately assumed it was somehow my fault, even though I hadn’t said a word. I felt so awkward from then on. It wasn’t my best reporting day. But when all you want is to do well – and when doing well means getting players to share insights about their livelihoods – your discomfort feels like it pales in comparison to the desire to tell someone what happened and ensure it doesn’t happen again.

Plus, many of the ways in which women in clubhouses experience sexual harassment are subtle. They’re not things that would rise to the level of requiring legal action. They’re also not things that (ahem) seem to reach the level of fireable offenses to many teams. So telling someone almost guarantees that your job will get harder and little will change besides your reputation. Plus, the weird half-unwritten rule of baseball clubhouses is what happens there stays there. If a reporter were constantly tweeting every offensive thing or every unflattering comment said off the record, they would have a tough time getting anyone to say anything to them ever. But if players couldn’t be comfortable there, they wouldn’t allow the access the media has – access that’s crucial to doing their job.

It’s a rare setup in which an industry has cultivated a safe space for its employees to be as misogynistic, homophobic, etc, as they want. I know I’ve often been disheartened by what I see and hear there, but the trade for access is discretion. It’s an unofficial contract to which reporters have tacitly agreed for years, one that – like so many things we accepted as necessary, was never really OK. And it fosters the power dynamics that lead to behavior like this.

I know so many women who report on baseball have stories somewhere along the sexual harassment gradient. I certainly have plenty. What I don’t think people fully grasp is how widespread this is. And what’s so galling is the line between what is appropriate and what isn’t IS NOT BLURRY, even though almost everyone who crosses it tries to say it is in retrospect.

I’ve had interactions with many male baseball folks who never come near that line or even threaten to do so. It’s not a hard problem for a man in pro baseball to avoid. As the reporting of @KatieJStrang and @Britt_Ghiroli showed, most of this stuff is unsolicited – a professional text was met with a flirty (or worse) one. Professional politeness suddenly equates to green light.

I am so flabbergasted – and I never ever say flabbergasted because it literally only applies here – by the idea that someone would assume that’s what a reporter wants out of these conversations. Where does one buy a delusional level of confidence like that?

And hiring more women isn’t the answer. All that does is ask women to clean up a mess they didn’t create. I’ve often worried I should have spoken up at times. Like, what if staying quiet means it happens again to someone else? I feel guilt.

But ultimately, those in baseball who act like Porter et al. KNOW these texts and comments aren’t ok. So do the people around them. They look the other way: if a reporter isn’t going to make it public, it’s not worth causing a stir to stop it. I can relate to the calculus because, though I’m often ashamed to say so, I looked the other way because my discomfort wasn’t worth more than my ability to do my job.

Anyway, that’s why it’s so important that women like the ones who shared their stories with the Athletic do so. Because causing a stir about behavior like that should only hurt one person’s ability to do his job, and we’re not there yet.

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Flabbergasted indeed.

At ThinkBlueLA.com, we are blessed to have three very talented female writers on our staff – Lauren Jennings, Jayann Kellogg, and Amie Cuevas – with several other occasional female guest writers. Each has their own writing style and personality, which we absolutely embrace.

Rest assured that should anyone attempt to pull the crap that Chelsea Janes – and the others – have had to put up with on any of our lady writers, the powers that be will immediately hear about it.

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