Why Larry David Wanted Seinfeld's George Costanza To Work For The Yankees

George Costanza is a mystery. How can one man be so selfish, neurotic, petty, and just all-around pathetic? He doesn't really have any positive qualities. He's a bad friend, a worse boyfriend, and a deplorable employee. The biggest mystery surrounding George may be that anyone is his friend in the first place.

For our eternal amusement, we're glad people were foolish enough to allow George into their lives for nine glorious seasons. If you're making a Greatest Sitcom Characters list, he's almost certainly going to rank the highest out of anyone from the "Seinfeld" ensemble. Only one man would plow through a living room full of children and one elderly woman with a walker upon whiffing a kitchen fire. Yes, he's the only man on the planet who'd cause a multi-family crisis by attempting to reel a marble rye, via fishing rod, up to the third floor of an Upper East Side apartment building. He is a miserable marvel.

So of course he worked for the New York Yankees, the most detestable professional sports franchise in existence — and even better that he was often forced to interact with George Steinbrenner, the bombastic owner of the team who was known for publicly battling with his managers and players. Steinbrenner, aka "The Boss," was plenty miserable in his own right, and thus deserving of a lousy underling like George.

This raises the question: How does a world-class incompetent like George land what would be, for most Yankees fans, a dream job? "Seinfeld" co-creator Larry David has that answer for you.

In Peter Botte's book "The Big 50: The Men and Moments That New York Yankees," David revealed that George wound up in the front office of the New York Yankees because it was appealing to him as a lifelong fan of the boys in pinstripes. As David told Botte:

"First and foremost, we needed a job for George for the next season. He had been unemployed the year before. And we needed to give him a job. I was thinking, 'What's a cool job for George? What job would I want to have?' Well, I always wanted to work for the Yankees. So I said one day, 'Maybe he can work for the Yankees.' And that was it. You know, we didn't put as much thought into these things as people think. Everything was just a whim generally."

Knowing what we now know of David through 12 seasons of "Curb Your Enthusiasm," he probably would've been as awful at that job as the character who was his surrogate in the "Seinfeld" universe. The Boss is gone now, but it would've been fun to see the real Larry David man a desk for one season under his iron-fisted rule. It could've been the Summer of Larry!