Baseball firings part of larger trend

What do Alex Cora, A.J. Hinch and Travis Kalanick have in common? All three were fired as high-profile managers at the top of their respective fields, for ethical violations.

And all three — along with newly hired New York Mets manager Carlos Beltran, who was quit-fired on Thursday — are part of a trend that’s probably here to stay.

You screw up in a way that reflects on your character and the culture of your employer, you’re gone. It doesn’t matter anymore if you’re the most successful field general in baseball, like Hinch at the Houston Astros, or a popular World Series-winner in sportscrazed Boston, like Cora was at the Red Sox.

It doesn’t matter if you founded the company, like Kalanick at Uber, who was ousted in 2017 amid allegations he turned a blind eye to sexual harassment and bullied underlings and drivers.

Badly behaving executives have always gotten the boot, of course, if their deeds are bad enough. But until recently, especially in the CEO seat, it almost had to involve a crime, such as the pilfering Dennis Kozlowski at Tyco, or a sexual offense that was hard to ignore.

Even then, as was the case at an industrial company and a school system that I covered in Connecticut, the executives were allowed to quietly retire or move along.

No more. Just over the last two or three years, the public ouster is a rising trend in corporate America. That includes Major League Baseball, where Hinch and his general manager, then Cora, then Beltran, all saw their stellar careers crash this past week after an MLB report on a cheating scandal named them.

“It’s improved management and improved governance,” said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a professor and senior associate dean at the Yale School of Management, an authority on corporate leadership. Going forward, he added, “I’m seeing it as a constant rising tide of accountability that doesn’t ebb and flow.”

Here’s why, in no particular order: The #MeToo movement, making sexual harassment and assault the firing offense it always should have been; instant social media that ends secrecy and amplifies criticism; and a tighter financial environment in which customers have choices and margins for error are thinner.

Oh, and let’s not forget reactions to President Donald Trump, whose constant outrages come with a pass but create a backlash across the nation. “There’s pent-up anger over lack of accountability in certain quarters that President Trump has been able to get away with things,” Sonnenfeld said.

We don’t really have to list his outrages, do we?

Suffice to say, a CEO or other professional who made comments like Trump made on a bus more than a dozen years ago would be out on his or her ear if they came out today. Just ask Billy Bush how his career is going.

It’s all a matter of public perceptions. Think about baseball, for example. The sport is desperately vying to attract millennials, women and African Americans — anyone other than white male baby-boomers, the baseball fan core. That means the old-boy ways of operating don’t fly anymore in a world where endless entertainment options live at the end of everyone’s thumbs.

Sonnenfeld, who runs a CEO summit several times a year for the heads of the biggest corporations

and nonprofits, sees the firings as part of a wave of transparency.

“It’s widepread and technolgically infused and culturally leveraged transparency that’s pushing for this accountability,” he said. “It cuts across sectors and cuts across levels.”

And it’s always filled with complexity. Take Beltran at the Mets, for example. He’s out of a job even though he was a player, not a coach, in 2017 when the cheating happened at the Astros. But he was named in the MLB report as a ringleader.

Who’s the incoming owner of the Mets? Steven A. Cohen, the $13-billionaire hedge fund owner who lives in Greenwich, who himself faced severe sanctions in 2015 over insider trading allegations. Cohen, more known for collecting art than sports teams, will need the consent of 75 percent of baseball owners, probably in five years

when he’s expected to take control of the team.

And so out went Beltran, the popular former slugger. Cohen, through a spokesman, declined to comment after Beltran officially resigned, saying it was best for the team and for baseball.

A handful of very high profile cases have both illustrated and sped up the trend. Think Les Moonves at CBS and Roger Ailes at Fox News on the sexual misconduct front, Elizabeth Holmes at the medical testing company Theranos for deep fraud, or more recently, Adam Neumann at WeWork for financial misstatements.

Those, of course, all had such serious allegations that they might not have survived in any era. But they have elevated awareness.

A 2019 report from the consulting firm PwC showed that among the 2,500 largest publicly traded companies, an all-time high of 39

percent of ousted CEOs were fired for misconduct in 2018 — up from 26 percent the year before.

The baseball firings serve as a great example of the trend for several reasons. First, the umbrella business — Major League Baseball — had already meted out a one-year suspension for Hinch and Astros General Manager Jeff Luhnow, and had taken draft picks from the team. That wasn’t good enough for owner Jim Crane, a self-made business owner of huge wealth who, himself, had faced allegations of racism in the past.

Credit Crane for bravely stepping up to the plate an hour after the report came out and saying, “This won’t happen again on my watch.”

Contrast that with New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, who has stood by all sorts of shenanigans of his head coach, Bill

Belichick, amid National Football League sanctions, though never as severe as the recent baseball suspensions.

The baseball managers were accused of using technology to steal the hand signals used by opposing catchers to tell pitchers what to throw. It involved video monitors and banging on trash cans, ingenious. It’s notable that stealing signs is legal, more or less, but using technology to do so is the no-no.

So we’re talking about shades here, but very important shades. The lesson, learned hard by four of the biggest names in baseball management: In this world, a gray area of the past becomes a bright line today.

“They’re emblematic,” Sonnenfeld said, “and these are very important public symbols.”