If you don’t know or care about baseball, and turn around and leave the room if pro sports are on TV, that’s OK–but stay with me. Because this “baseball book” is really about something much more interesting (and morbidly entertaining): how people in an organization drive each other nuts, leading to irrational and counterproductive decisions.
Yeahbut, yeahbut! The Yankees won the championship anyway, didn’t they? So they couldn’t have done anything that wrong.
They won in spite of all the craziness. Besides, the teams they were playing against surely had their own corporate kookiness.
So it’s all here: the clash of bloated egos, gossip and backbiting, unbelievably stupid quotes that get out there in the media and cheese everybody off, spite galore, and individuals doing really dumb things just to show each other who’s boss. And you begin to wonder, “These are grown men? Really? Men who are allowed to vote and drive cars?”
But the foolishness that went on inside the Yankees can be found inside a business, big or small, inside a political party at any level, in an army, in a freakin’ fishing club, churches, softball teams–wherever people get together to rub each other the wrong way. And most of them are otherwise rational people who never would’ve gotten anywhere at all if they’d acted like this all the time. And did I mention that it only takes two people to make a messed-up organization? If it could be done solo, it would be.
The Bible warns us not to put our trust in man, whose breath is in his nostrils. Original Sin doesn’t have to confine itself to starting World War II: the devil’s just as happy with a one-on-one pissing contest.
How depressing is mankind, let me count the ways. I am reading Blaise Pascal’s “Penees” right now and he waxes on about how man has greatness and concupiscence at the same time. Rushdoony was perturbed by how much pettiness there is in the local church.
Wherever people get together, you find original sin.
At least “Inside the Yankees” is funny.