Dig This: New Yankee Stadium Now Minus One Buried Big Papi Jersey
Via the Post:
The curse has been broken – out of the ground, that is.
A pair of hardhats working at the new Yankee Stadium dropped a dime on the location of a buried Red Sox jersey.
Beantown-loving construction worker Gino Castignoli, who lives in The Bronx, confessed to The Post last week that he buried a Red Sox slugger David Ortiz jersey at the site last summer while working at the stadium.
After reading about the traitorous act in The Post, the two workers approached a construction manager and said they remembered Castignoli, who only worked at the Stadium one day, and thought they knew where he must have placed the shirt.
They led the manager to a service corridor near the site of the planned Legends Club restaurant, behind home plate and toward the third base side.
After the hardhats pointed to the spot, workers brought out jackhammers and dug furiously for five hours, creating a 2-foot- by-3-foot, gravel-filled pit in their search for the tainted threads.
They spotted the jersey at 3:25 p.m. and called Yankee brass. The cursed shirt was about two feet deep in cement.
“They absolutely pinpointed that if it was in the ground, that’s where it was,” team spokeswoman Alice McGillion said, as she let The Post inspect the now partly buried shirt.
But the team declined to identify its latest heroes.
Said McGillion: “The workers came forward this morning and said that they thought if there was a shirt buried, this is where it was” – on the stadium’s lowest level, behind where the field-level seats will be.
After the discovery, the team ordered the work stopped – and left the shirt in the cement in preparation for an extraction ceremony today.
“We want to thank The Post for raising the issue,” McGillion said. “The [two] workers were terrific in coming forward. They wanted the shirt out of there.”
As it turns out, Castignoli, 46, has been in trouble before. The hulking mason once pleaded guilty to involvement in a $40 million illegal gambling operation with ties to the Gambino crime family.
He was busted in February 2002 during a roundup of mob-connected gambling dens, according to the Brooklyn DA’s Office.
But it was the betrayal of his borough that elicited Bronx cheers from many Yankee fans – including the new Boss, Hank Steinbrenner.
“I hope his coworkers kick the s- – - out of him,” said George’s boy, who now runs the team with his brother Hal.
Other reports say that the Yankees plan to donate the jersey to charity. I’d almost rather see them put it on display somewhere in the Yankees museum that will be down the right field line at the new Stadium. Let it stand as testament to the fact that Yankees fans will leave no stone unturned in an effort to show their support for the team.
Bah, put it in a Yankee museum and let it stand as a testament to Red Sox fans complete obsession with the Yankees – an obsession that knows no bounds. Although the sad and pathetic creatures that inhabit “Red Sox Nation” are always on the hunt for a new way to show just how obsessed they really are.
Big Papi has yet to do anything this season. Perhaps the “curse” backfired.