[Dr Dog]

New York Yankees unearth buried Red Sox jersey from new stadium
By Karen Matthews, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS



Construction workers try to free a Boston Red Sox jersey with the name of player David Ortiz from concrete at the new Yankee Stadium in New York, Sunday, April 13, 2008. THE ASSOCIATED PRESS/Frances Roberts

NEW YORK - 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 two feet of concrete, he said.

On Sunday, Levine and Yankees CEO Lonn Trost watched as Gramarossa and foreman Rich Corrado finished the job and pulled the shirt from the rubble.

In shreds from the jackhammers, the shirt still bore the letters "Red Sox" on the front. It was a David Ortiz jersey, No. 34.

Trost said the Yankees had discussed possible criminal charges against Castignoli with the district attorney's office.

"We will take appropriate action since fortunately we do know the name of the individual," he said.

A woman who answered the phone at Castignoli's home in the Bronx on Sunday said he was not there.

A spokesman for Bronx District Attorney Robert Johnson said Sunday he did not know whether any criminal charges might apply.

Levine said the shirt would be cleaned up and sent to the Jimmy Fund, a charity affiliated with Boston's Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

"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," he said.

[ARTofMAKINGfire]

That guy is a douche-bag for certain. But criminal action? What law did he break? Littering? It's all that's on the news in NY right now. We take our sports seriously in this here town.

[dj digigrow]

how are you gonna live in the bronx(home of the yankees) and be a die hard boston fan...
he should just catch a beating from some real new yorkers and call it a day

i found this story stupid, but funny, criminal charges, blah, your honor this man is guilty of trying to put a jynx on the yankees, i wont take anything less than 25 to life.LOL get ice T and the special victims unit on the case , boom boom bo bo bo boom !!

[Hydrofome420]

LOL, this is to funny, yea and get McCoy to throw the book at him.
He needs a Beating being from the Bronx and being a sox fan

Me thinks he will need to move to Boston just to get
another construction job.




Stay safe and high.
........HYDRO........

[panopticist]

Murder is a "very, very bad thing."
Rape is a "very, very bad thing."

Putting a Red Sox shirt in the concrete of the Yankee's stadium is not.

I can't believe this following sentence was even uttered:
"Trost said the Yankees had discussed possible criminal charges against Castignoli with the district attorney's office."

It is just a shirt. If a shirt can prevent the Yankee's from winning a game of baseball, then they have much larger problems to address. More training, less superstition...

[RudolfTheRed]

The want to take legal action over it?

What a bunch of douche bags.

[ZoSo]

This is hilarious. I can't believe they tore up all the concrete just to retrieve it, but superstition is prevalent in baseball. I'm just glad the curse of the Bambino is broken.


GO SOX!

yep, taking legal action is way over the line. However, imo, the Yankee brass is just fucking with the guy. Putting a little scare into him. They have no real intentions of pressing charges.

[Stoner4Life]

LMFMFAO.......
curse my fuckin' arse, and as far as 'reversing the curse' goes for boston fans, that'll actually happen when the Yankees are kept from winning a world series for 86 years & not until then....... Curse of the Bambino = 86 long assed yrs.