Wednesday, June 03, 2009

Yankees' Lonn Trost Claims Poverty To Hide Documents

The New York Yankees have been, are and most likely will continue to be baseball's richest team with enough cash to buy an unending stream of talent. Money has never been an issue for Steinbrenner's team and with billions in public aid (whether the public knew about it or not) the Yanks cut costs on their new stadium. Yet when Assemblyman Brodsky questioned Lonn Trost about the communiques surrounding the deals made with city and state officials, Trost complains that it would be too expensive to get everything together.

From The Times-Union:

Lonn Trost, chief operating officer of the New York Yankees, dug in, so to speak, under questioning from state Assemblyman Richard Brodsky. The ball club itself was in Cleveland on Monday. The New York action took place in state Supreme Court in Albany.

Mr. Trost went for the bottom line, uttering the figure $5.5 million. That, he says, would be the cost of gathering all the documents Mr. Brodsky is trying to obtain about the publicly subsidized construction of the new Yankee Stadium.

More casual fans, less intensely interested in the inside baseball of stadium construction and other off-the-field arcanum, can be forgiven for wondering of Mr. Trost: Your point, sir?

There should be no point, because mentioning $5.5 million is nothing to that ballclub. With a team payroll of $201.5 million dollars (not to mention the front office or those that work in the stadium), providing those emails to Brodsky and the people he represents should not be a problem. Then when you factor in the billion(s) that the Yankees took from the taxpayers, we as New Yorkers have every right to see exactly how the deal was done.