The Color of Money: Ya gotta spend money to make money, if you’re the Pirates

Famed comedian Richard Pryor featured a piece on one of his albums and I vaguely recollect the monologue beginning something like this: “Hello there friends and neighbors, has God blessed you today? Well, if he hasn’t just send us twenty dollars and we’ll send you a genuine blessing from God.”& For many years, it appeared as if the Pittsburgh Pirates management might have expected some Powerball-like windfall to unexpectedly rain money from clouds to erase their fiscal and small market shortcomings, as well as the winning team that would come with it. For more than three decades, the Pirates fans have reminded me of some religious and faithful zealots sitting with their hands on the radio or their eyes fixed on the television hoping and sometimes expecting a resurrected spirit and a long-expected blessing of competition and winning to come forth. I am and shall remain a man of God, forever and a day.& But my late father, Oprah Elliott Bruce, once said: “I love God, but we must often get more callouses on our hands, than our knees.” In other words, we may pray about it, but we must work equally as hard at being about it. When the...