Stan McNeal of The Sporting News wrote today about the Astros’ two front office hires. The first one was Sig Mejdal, the Director of Decision Sciences I mentioned this morning.
The other: Stephanie Wilka, the team’s new coordinator of amateur scouting. But get how he describes Wilka in his article:
Wilka, a former cheerleader at Harvard, has worked in community relations with the Dodgers and Red Sox. She earned a law degree from Pepperdine and passed the California bar exam last July, according to the Astros’ release.
Harvard educated lawyer with major market MLB experience who is going to be in charge of fixing what may be the Astros’ biggest problem and she gets described as “a former cheerleader?” Really? Wow, that’s special.
Look, I don’t have a hair-trigger with this sort of thing. And I doubt McNeal is pushing some agenda here. Maybe he is just lazily repeating something he Googled about her or maybe it was in the Astros’ press release. But the fact that McNeal described the Mejdal hiring in rather mocking terms suggests to me that he was looking to mock the Wilka hiring somehow too and settled on this cheerleader comment. Whatever his intention, he comes off as sexist.
Unless of course McNeal typically researches the undergraduate extracurricular activities of male front office hires and throws them out there too. But I just sort of doubt he does.
