Cement Shirt

The other day when I heard that someone had stashed a Red Sox shirt in the cement at new Yankee Stadium, I joked that, given how many billions of dollars of public money was already being spent on the project, it wouldn't surprise me if they issued a subcontract to excavate the thing. And I'll be damned if they didn't:

With dust swirling around them on Sunday afternoon, Frank Gramarossa and Rich Corrado extracted a Red Sox jersey that a construction worker had buried at the site of the new Yankee Stadium. After workers used jackhammers to break through about two and a half feet of concrete, Gramarossa and Corrado pulled out a dusty, torn David Ortiz jersey.

Your tax dollars at work, citizens. There's a bit of a silver lining here, however:

Levine said the extracted jersey would be cleaned up, put in a display case along with a Yankees Universe T-shirt and sent to Boston. There, the Ortiz jersey and Yankee T-shirt will be auctioned to benefit the Jimmy Fund, the Red Sox’ primary charity, which is affiliated with the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

That's nice. Of course, since this is New York we're talking about here, every good act is counterbalanced by a silly, hyperbole-filled overreaction:

Trost said that the Yankees were speaking with the Bronx district attorney’s office about whether there was any criminality involved in the act and that the team was considering filing charges against the construction worker, identified by The Associated Press as Gino Castignoli, a Bronx resident.

“We take great pride in hiring Bronx residents,” Levine said. “He abused the privilege.”

Please. The guy created a nice bit of P.R. and a benefit to a worthy charity, however inadvertently. The only basis anyone has for going after him for this is that he caused the project to incur some extra expense. But let's face it, the frugality train on this project left the station a long, long time ago.