In times of confusion, unrest, or just turnover, BP South Side turns to Röcken native, Friedrich Nietzsche for insight and counsel. Monday’s transition from Robin Ventura to Rick Renteria, with Rick Hahn restating his odd, but assured stance that ‘we’ll know what the Sox are doing when they start doing it’ certainly calls for Nietzsche’s insight.
Was it time for the White Sox to move on from Robin Ventura?
“There is so much in man that is horrifying!…The world has been a madhouse for too long!”
So, yes? You think it was the right thing to do?
“The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.”
Do you worry about the bizarre mechanics of having Robin Ventura’s final season to prove himself going down with his preferred replacement working as his assistant? Does that not seem like a strange situation for both of them?
“This predilection for and overvaluation of compassion that modern philosophers show is, in fact, something new: up till now, philosophers were agreed as to the worthlessness of compassion. I need only mention Plato, Spinoza, La Rochefoucauld and Kant, four minds as different from one another as it is possible to be, but united on one point: their low opinion of compassion.”
A lot of White Sox fans likely have trouble warming up to having a man the Cubs fired as their manager, especially in lieu of some calls for another former player like A.J. Pierzynski, what do you say to them?
“The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.”
What of the famed ‘Cubs way’ do you expect to see Renteria bring over to the South Side?
“They muddy the water, to make it seem deep.”
There has been a lot of momentum for the White Sox to rebuild, focusing on arguments pointing to how much Chris Sale or Jose Quintana could pull in a trade, the need to revamp their farm system, their stagnancy with their current roster’s core, the price of trying to patch up this roster in free agency being prohibitive–
“I have, perhaps, never read anything to which I said ‘no’, sentence by sentence and deduction by deduction, as I did to this.”
So, should we anticipate the Sox investing and adding to this current group to compete in 2017? How do we buy-in to this leadership group being aggressive enough to pull that off, when they have mostly stuck to the mid-level budget shopping model that paid off in 2005 and 2008?
“What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more’ … Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.”
So…they’re demons, then?
“Amor Fati – “Love Your Fate”, which is in fact your life.”
What would you say to White Sox fans who wonder why they should keep supporting a struggling organization, who ask why they should consume a product that leaves them unsatisfied?
“As born winged-insects and intellectual honey-gatherers we are constantly making for them, concerned at heart with only one thing – to ‘bring something home.’”
A World Series title? In 2017?
“Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.
Ahh, that sounds more like something you would say.
“Only sick music makes money today.”
Lead Image Credit: Patrick Gorski // USA Today Sports Images
This interview has me begging for the opinions of Col. Walter E Kurtz.