According to a troubling report from Rachel Bachman and Brian Costa of the Wall Street Journal (subscription link), former MLB Advanced Media chief Bob Bowman was forced out of his position after multiple incidents of workplace misconduct.
Bowman left the entity in early November, not long after majority rights to a spun-off entity (BAMTech) was sold to Disney. MLB’s digital media arm has long been lauded as an industry leader that has generated massive revenues for the league and its member organizations.
The story is loaded with explosive details that could conceivably have broader ramifications within the league office. MLB Advanced Media has long been a separately operated entity with its own headquarters, though allegations against Bowman — in some cases dating back to over a decade — are said to have made their way to the commissioner’s chair.
Bowman is reported to have engaged in a variety of concerning actions during his tenure, including “propositioning female colleagues, allegedly conducting consensual relationships with subordinate coworkers and cultivating a culture of partying and heavy drinking with employees outside the office.” A few other particularly concerning episodes are detailed yet further in the report. Bowman is reported to have shoved an executive in the Red Sox ownership group this past July. MLB Advanced Media is also said to have hosted a party at the 2016 All-Star Game that included entertainment consisting of “alleged escorts.”
In comments to the Journal, current MLB commissioner Rob Manfred acknowledged that an October incident — in which Bowman is said to have engaged in verbal abuse of someone within his office — represented “the culmination of a variety of issues that had gone on over a period of time” and “precipitated” a mutual decision to part ways. Bowman, meanwhile, admitted that his own “personal flaws” led to “inappropriate behavior.”
Whether there could be further repercussions is not clear at this time, but some of the allegations — especially, those involving sexual harassment and other such issues — are deeply concerning and could seemingly be of ongoing importance. More generally, the report suggests questions about the league’s priorities. Significant profits have already been logged despite the problems that evidently existed under Bowman. Most recently, it has been widely reported that each MLB club is slated to receive an approximately $50MM payout from the BAMTech sale.
“propositioning female colleagues, allegedly conducting consensual relationships with subordinate coworkers and cultivating a culture of partying and heavy drinking with employees outside the office.”
There’s notihing wrong with any of that. Violence and hookers, on the other hand…
LMAO
was that wrong? was that in the employee handbook? if someone had told me that kind of activity was frowned upon…..
Nice one Costanza
Consensual relationships…oh my!
This is exactly like every restaurant job I ever worked at…you see there nobody is wealthy so nobody is claiming rape. I imagine the exec’s are just trying to be ahead of the curve.
Piece of garbage, you are.
He isn’t wrong.
Yes he is. Propositioning female colleagues?? That’s not appropriate for the workplace. What a scumbag. But what’s even worse is that MLB was willing to look the other way because that company was making a lot of money for them. That’s messed up
He isn’t actually. He never said it was appropriate, just stated that these things take place. Which anyone who has worked in a restaurant will verify that it’s true.
Looks like you were never invited to the parties Yoda lol
Why is juicemane a piece of garbage? For telling you how it really is?
I thought that $50M per club payout sounded too good to be true. Never the less, I’m sure this is all just a BIG ol’ misunderstanding.
I’m sure teams like the Mets and Marlins will take that $50M and invest it into the on-field product. Can’t wait to see who they sign!
ROFLMAO!!!! XD
Don’t forget the O’s!
So who got the Marlins $50 million, Loria or Jeter?
Was it just divided up 29 ways along with the approval of Jeter over the Cuban Billionaire who would have added to the roster instead of selling it off for ten cents on the dollar?
I’m sure Ken and Buster are working real hard to give us those details right now.
do we really need to know that someone we never heard of before was misbehaving in an mlb office?
Do we really need to know that someone who we haven’t seen posting here doesn’t know, or care, about this potentially far-reaching issue?
Got ‘emmmmmmm!
People still say that?
Nice
Yes raef we do
It is actually about $68 mil.
Darn…$1 million away from 69
Simply beautiful.
Can we donate the rest to get there??
So this explains why the mlb.com team message boards are never moderated. The mods are too busy getting cheeks in their face !
This made me giggle
I could get by on that $50M. I would have to cut back a little bit here and there, but I could make it work.
I’d like to shove someone in the Red Sox ownership group for being asleep this offseason.
If there were no rapes, everybody had safe and consensual sex, they were all over the age of consent & drinking AND did not drive under the influence, I see nothing wrong with it.. Worse things happen in better places……
When I worked for Radisson International one of our accounts was with Sterling (parent company of most of the big jewelry retailers at the time), and some of the things I saw their sales reps do in our hotels would make most if not all these alleged shenanigans seem G rated.
Moron.
He’s not wrong and neither are you. Personally, I don’t think that those offenses are grounds to fire someone. But it’s a gray area. Just because you have a different opinion and interpretation doesn’t make others morons.
I wonder if any of you that don’t see anything wrong here have ever had a sexual harassment training at work. Or maybe you are 14, or maybe you have never had a professional job. In the trainings they make it pretty clear cut.
So…you think everyone in the organization was participating, and consenting? Every single employee was having a good time sleeping with the boss? No one was benefitting from it or in a position to lose if they didn’t?
It is the power imbalance between the parties and the culture such behavior creates that are the grounds for termination due to misconduct at most places of employment, mostly because these activities expose companies to liability due to sexual harassment claims, if you are going to take a purely legalistic view.
It is also disrespectful, unprofessional, undignified and reveals a lack of discipline that is unbecoming (and potentially disastrous) in a leader.
Nope
Oh god, found the HR rep who thinks sexual harassment training does anything. Did you want to put Yuli Gurriel through some racial sensitivity training as well?
I think a great many people confuse company policy with the law. Or confuse their morals with the law. The reality is it takes a quid pro quo situation or a no, and the conduct continuing to qualify as sexual harassment in any setting.
If if if
And if the queen had balls she would be king
And then they came for my baseball….
And it all went on right under Bud Selig’s nose, who was rewarded with the HOF.
What can we say? Bud is a dope. A mediocre owner of a second-rate franchise and a spineless pawn as commissioner.
Selig to me will never be any more admirable than the shifty used car salesman that he literally was before buying his stake in the Milwaukee Braves and has figuratively continued to be to this day.
Exactly.
It’s not as if Selig was traveling back and forth between St. Louis and Chicago twenty years ago sticking needles in the rear end of Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa. Bud was just an innocent bumbler.
After the strike obviously Bud must have known that something was going on, right? And if he was an “innocent bumbler” he probably shouldn’t have been put in charge of a multi-billion industry.
Bud was a bumbler, not an innocent one. He was a pawn of the other owners, who were so crazed about growing revenues that they were blinded to the steroids. That’s when a commissioner should protect the interests of the game. But he was too swept up by revenue growth, too. And it was a pattern. He got Milwaukee to pay for two stadiums without spending a dime. He took millions in revenue sharing and did not invest any of it in player development. He engineered a switch to the NL to benefit his mediocre franchise after “ceding” ownership to his daughter and vowing to pursue the interest of baseball, not the Brewers. There is more, but the pattern is evident. His plaque in the HOF should, at the very least, have an asterisk.
When you are the boss and you have a relationship with one of your subordinates, even if consensual, it is still a major conflict of interest.
No
It’s interesting that the allegations in this article do not appear to contain references to anything that is considered sexual harassment. Maybe the actual report does, I didn’t read it.
Is propositioning female co-workers? No
Consensual relationships with subordinates?
No
Cultivating a culture of heavy drinking and partying among employees?
No
Shoving a Red Sox employee?
No, although that is battery
Having parties where entertainment consists of escorts?
Hookers, or escorts? Escorts are legal. Hookers being present are legal. The only legal issue is soliciting sex from a hooker, which is solicitation, but not sexual harassment, and not an area where anyone attending is a victim, or was being sexually harassed.
Serious issue, but I don’t see sexual harassment anywhere.
You might want to brush up on labor laws. He’s pretty squarely in the wrong.
I’m a lawyer. Took Labor law in law school. Labor law is about unions. You probably mean employment law. He may be in the moral wrong but not the legal wrong. Propositioning co-workers is not illegal, repeatedly doing it after being asked to stop is. It is a conflict of interest, also not illegal, and companies generally have a reporting policy for relationships that develop, even between supervisor/subordinate. But company policies do not dictate what is legal or not. Ik not saying there’s no legal issues here, but sexual harassment, unless there’s something not in this article, is not one of them.
Employment law – you are correct.
Wouldn’t you say that when a senior executive has a series of sexual propositions and actions and there’s been no escalating disciplinary action, he’s fueling a workplace culture that opens the firm to class action lawsuits? It rises to the level of institutional neglect by failing to protect the rights of all employees to do their jobs and seek advancement without discrimination or harassment.
Well, institutional level neglect is not what’s mentioned here, they mentioned sexual harassment against an individual. So here’s what most people are kidding here. You can proposition anyone, of legal age and competence. That’s not illegal or harassment because it’s a co-worker or even a subordinate. Where it becomes harassment is if it continues after the person is told to stop. Until then it may be inappropriate, and it may be a conflict of interest, but it’s not harassment. At the point where one combines AFTER being told to stop, that’s when it becomes harassment. Has to be after the no, even in a subordinate/supervisor setting. Or quid pro quo, where employment benefits or negative reinforcements are conditioned upon something sexual.
A lack of institutional control only comes in after there’s a complaint. Typically, the way sexual harassment works is that the employer just has to have a designated representative in place to receive the complaint, and then has to take remedial action it reasonably believes shall correct the issue.
Sexual harassment liability is, outside of quid pro quo, generally entirely dependent on being told to stop and continuing, not the nature of the work relationship between the individuals involved.
*most people are missing here
*where one continues AFTER being told to stop
Really need an edit option on the mobile app
Propositioning female coworkers is definitely sexual harassment ! It creates an unsafe
and hostile work environment for the women who work there!
You are completely correct. I feel so bad for women
Go feign outrage somewhere else, white knight
My wife was a subordinate coworker. Went out on a date, later married while still working together, she was my secretary, and 30 years later still at it.
So long as you can say no w/o any consequences and its not persistent its not harrassment. But people believe anything these days
Well, good for you and your wife but a lot of women do say “no” and a lot of women get fired because of it. Baseball, like most sports, is run by a boy’s club and no, you shouldn’t date people who work directly under you (I know, lousy double entendre) because it does put them in a compromising position (I know, again..) Good for you and your wife but what if she had broken up with you after, say, two years? Would everything still be okay?
No, it isn’t. There has to be a no and stop asking in there.
Sexual harassment has such a vague legal definition and application that propositioning female coworkers falls under its umbrella.
I worked at BAM for over five years. He’s the least of their troubles.
Yeah I’m sure you did buddy
#MeToo
Sounds like he stepped on the wrong toes. Half the CEO’s in the country and most of Congress, MLB star players and managers, not to mention our darling President Are guilty of that and much more. I doubt there are any real concerns for MLB and MLBAM except now that its public there may be some false accusations of those looking to cash in
While I think this is an important story, I don’t understand why it’s relevant on a trade rumors site.
You saw the headline. No one made you read it. Why did you then?
The idea that this is a trade rumors site first and foremost is only in name and history. Lately its the number one source for news and industry politics/discussion.
Sounds to me like a pretty fun place to work.
My thoughts exactly.
Sounds like it was a fun place to work .sounds like a typical sales environment to me.Everyone is so sensitive these days makes me want to throw up !!!
Tell me about it, man. All these women who don’t want to be raped by their supervisors. They need to get over it.
Consensual sex is not rape. I’m not condoning what took place, but to compare the two is simply asinine.
“consensual” means they were both ok with it.
Lol here’s davidcoonce74 on queue to take an issue and hyperbolically skew it politically.
I think people get sexual harassment, and sexual assault mixed up.