A lawsuit Wednesday alleged that Jeff Wilpon, the chief operating officer of the New York Mets, harassed and later fired one of his senior vice presidents because he didn't agree with her pregnancy. If this is true – if these disgusting, abhorrent acts of misogyny receive even one iota of confirmation – one of Bud Selig's final acts as commissioner must be to rid Major League Baseball of this nepotistic fraud once and for all.

Selig, or his successor Rob Manfred, must do this because baseball needs to tell the world it is a safe place for women. That its top executives won't scoff and sneer and bungle the issues that face women every day like the NFL did the Ray Rice case. MLB shouldn't do this as a reaction to Rice; it should because it is the right thing to do. Whether it's a left to the jaw or a barrage of dehumanizing insults, a system that allows any kind of mistreatment toward women is broken.

Baseball likes to consider itself a progressive sport, dating back to Jackie Robinson's breaking the color line and through today, with Billy Bean serving as an ambassador to the LGBT community. Women occupy a number of high-ranking positions in baseball. One such woman worked as a senior vice president for the Mets. Her name is Leigh Castergine, and she ran ticket sales for the Mets until Wilpon fired her three weeks ago after demeaning her for nearly a year with churlish comments about being pregnant without being married, according to her lawsuit.

The idea of a Wilpon playing moral superior – of someone from the family that profited off the Ponzi scheme Bernie Madoff used to cripple lives holding himself in such esteem – dovetails with the stories of social and emotional incompetence that have chased him during his years running the Mets. It takes a remarkable level of ineptitude to make Jim Dolan look like the more competent of the New York sports scions.

View photos The lawsuit alleges Jeff Wilpon told Leigh Castergine that when she gets a ring, she will make more money. (AP) More

For years, Selig's soft spot for the Wilpon family has allowed him to overlook their need for a loan to stay afloat amid the Madoff chaos, their mismanagement of a jewel franchise into the sort that operates like a low-revenue pauper, their public flubs that made #LOLMets a thing. Selig enabled the Mets knowing majority owner Fred Wilpon planned on gifting the franchise to Jeff, an underqualified bully who never would have sniffed sports-franchise ownership were he not bequeathed his last name.

Now MLB faces this reality: Jeff Wilpon sits on the board of directors for MLB Enterprises and MLB Network. The former group procures national broadcasting, sponsorship and licensing deals, and the latter is the public face of the sport. It's one thing to have a reprobate in ownership; it's another to give him a position of power in rooms where billion-dollar deals are negotiated.

Does a company really want to do business with an entity that confers power on a man who allegedly told a Mets employee he is "old fashioned and thinks [Castergine] should be married before having a baby"? A man who told her that "when she gets a ring, she will make more money and get a bigger bonus"? A man who, in front of a room of executives, laid out two rules for dealing with Castergine, according to the lawsuit: "Don't touch her belly and don't ask how she's doing; she's not sick, she's pregnant"?

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