Dodgers Acquire Mandate Of Heaven

Dodgers Acquire Mandate Of Heaven

LOS ANGELES. The Los Angeles Dodgers announced Wednesday that they have acquired the Mandate of Heaven, filling a seat that has sat vacant since 2017 and formally establishing the organization as the ordained ruler of Major League Baseball. The club declined to disclose terms.

The Mandate was first articulated by the Duke of Zhou around 1046 BCE, shortly after the Zhou had overthrown the Shang. The doctrine holds that the right to rule is granted by the heavens, that it is conditional on the ruler's conduct, and that it may be withdrawn without notice. Baseball has recognized it as a aquireable asset since roughly 1923. League officials confirmed the mandate does not count against the competitive balance tax, on the grounds that it is not a player, contract, or thing. The longest continuous holding belongs to the Zhou, who kept the mandate for roughly 790 years. No franchise is expected to approach this, but the New York Yankees held it for most of the twentieth century. For a stretch in the 2010s, the mandate appeared to reside in San Francisco, though only during even-numbered years. No successful mechanism has ever been proposed for its reproduction, and the literature on alternating mandates remains thin. The most recent withdrawal of the mandate occurred in 2017. The heavens, which have communicated their will since antiquity through floods, droughts, eclipses, and the sudden appearance of comets, revoked the mandate from the Houston Astros upon determining that the signs from above were being stolen. The nine years that followed are classified as a period of disunity. Several franchises attempted a claim during the vacancy. None were ordained until today.

The mandate is revocable. Documented grounds for withdrawal include famine, earthquake, peasant revolt, and, under the modern reading, elimination in the Wild Card round. The dynastic cycle holds that every holder eventually grows complacent, that complacency hardens into corruption, that corruption invites disaster, and that disaster invites replacement. Historians noted one further condition that the front office may not have fully accounted for. Under the traditional system, the official history of a dynasty is never written by that dynasty. It is compiled afterward, by the one that replaced it. "The team that ends you writes your media guide. That part never makes it into negotiations."