This is actually pretty funny.
A construction worker's bid to curse the New York Yankees by planting a Boston Red Sox jersey in their new stadium was foiled Sunday when the home team removed the offending shirt from its burial spot.After locating the shirt in a service corridor behind what will be a restaurant in the new Yankee Stadium, construction workers jackhammered through the concrete Sunday and pulled it out.
The team said it learned that a Sox-rooting construction worker had buried a shirt in the new Bronx stadium, which will open next year across the street from the current ballpark, from a report in the New York Post on Friday.
Yankees President Randy Levine said team officials at first considered leaving the shirt where it was.
"The first thought was, you know, it's never a good thing to be buried in cement when you're in New York," Levine said. "But then we decided, why reward somebody who had really bad motives and was trying to do a really bad thing?"
On Saturday, construction workers who remembered the employee, Gino Castignoli, phoned in tips about the shirt's location.
"We had anonymous people come tell us where it was, and we were able to find it," said Frank Gramarossa, a project executive with Turner Construction, the general contractor on the site.
It took about five hours of drilling Saturday to locate the shirt under 2 feet of concrete.
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Levine said the shirt would be cleaned up and sent to the Jimmy Fund, a charity affiliated with Boston's Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Along with that, New York will send a Yankees Universe T-shirt, which is sold to benefit Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.
"Hopefully, the Jimmy Fund will auction it off, and we'll take the act that was a very, very bad act and turn it into something beautiful," Levine said.
What the Yankees should have done was leave the jersey right where it was and start talking Red Sox curse 2.0. David Ortiz ended the weekend hitting .070, not a typo, with one home run and three RBIs in 43 at-bats. He had a .231 on-base percentage and a .140 slugging percentage, not a typo and not a typo.That would have been a good time to blame Big Papi's slump on Hardhat Red Sox Boy. I mean, how could such a very, very bad act not bring down the wrath of the baseball gods on the very person whose jersey was underground? The Yankees could have made Castignoli's life miserable and given Red Sox fans a new curse to worry about, all with one wry smile and a few well-chosen words. Every time something went wrong with the Red Sox, they could have reminded everybody about the jersey.