Brushback Pitches Are Just Part Of Baseball

And after getting beaten up in the press — “This $1 billion-plus pavilion and park financed with a lot of taxpayer help is beginning to sound like something fit for the Wizard of Oz” — Yankee Club President Randy Levine should quit whining and take it like a man. After all, the team is getting $362 million in public financing — sorry, “infrastructure improvements” (what is that for, gold-plated sewers?) — for a stadium that is supposedly completely privately financed. To put this in perspective, Citizens Bank Park — home of the 2008 World Champion Philadelphia Phillies — cost $346 million total. And when did the Yankees last win a World Series? Oh, never mind:

Club President Randy Levine, speaking at a state Assembly hearing in Manhattan, called the project’s main critic “disgraceful.”

And the city’s economic-development chief, Seth Pinsky, accused the critic, Westchester Assemblyman Richard Brodsky, of “deliberately misrepresenting the facts.”

Brodsky, in turn, lashed out at Levine and Pinsky, challenging both to a “civil, in-your-face fistfight” over public financing of the stadium.

The angry club president replied, “In these tough times, you should be encouraging us to create jobs, instead of engaging in political grandstanding that discourages it. Your behavior in trying to hurt the people of this city is disgraceful.”