Sports owners in general have no requirement to be good people, or caring people, or apparently even non-racist people. Their requirement is to have a billion dollars.
Lincoln and Armstrong represented the arm of that billion-dollar enterprise tasked with running the operations. Are they coherent, or skilled? It doesn't appear so. Nothing in Baker's article is particularly shocking to me.
Could Jack be in over his head? Sure. Could Divish just have been talking to Baker about this? Yep. Peter Angelos is a terrible owner who creates a dysfunctional work environment... but his Orioles are now a decent club thanks to some good FO moves (despite his ownership and meddling) and the correct pick of a manager to lead those 25 men.
Does having the ownership structure and upper-management that we do have make it harder to win a World Series than it otherwise could be? I don't see how it's even possible to argue that they give us the best chance to win it, not with a straight face.
Can we win one in spite of "disfunction" and "personality clashes" and "sour grapes?"
You bet. None of those guys play. Get 25 championship performers together and see if they can't overcome.
I don't care if we find them on purpose or by accident, I just want to find them. We'll have to find a couple more by accident than the really well run teams. Okay - San Francisco did, and got lucky with health to boot. That's what I want us to do. The rest is all noise, because I can't control any of it anyway. Lincoln isn't firing himself so unless Nintendo sells to Hansen after yet another Sonics deal falls through, we're stuck with what we've got.
Office friction happens. It seems that it happens here more than it happens in the best-run orgs, but I can't imagine anyone thought we were one of those. If anybody thinks the White Sox that won a WS last decade were a brilliantly-run organization with no friction I have a bridge to sell you. We have a FO with a skill in finding young talent. That talent now needs to be developed and either utilized or traded, and we need to use our dollar advantage to purchase the right players. Here's hoping they can do that in between shooting spit-balls at each other in the break room.
~G
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