Yankees Brouhaha: A Swing and a Miss?

How do you know if a watchdog group is just barking at the wind?

A group called Good Jobs New York alleges that the New York Yankees have been putting bogus expenses on the city's tab.

Through the Freedom of Information Act, the watchdog group gained access to receipts for around $100,000 in "lavish" expenses submitted in 2005 to the Parks Department. The group claims the money was to be spuriously deducted as "planning costs" covered by a city subsidy.

The expenses in question: Among others, $31,364 in food and bar tabs, $28,000 in novelties and gifts, and $25,000 for office space near Newark Airport.

The subsidy in question: In 2001, when Yankees owner George Steinbrenner began agitating for a replacement for the house that Ruth built, then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani authorized his major-league team of choice to deduct up to $5 million per year of their "stadium planning costs" for the next five years from their rent payments to the city.

Good Jobs provides PDF examples of some of the receipts—always a crowd pleaser. They range from $47 for an intern's goodbye lunch to $1,160 for crystal baseballs, but all in all, the whole thing seems like more smoke than fire.

"We've always been required to send volumes and volumes of documentation, " said Alice McGillion, a spokesperson for the Yankees. McGillion denies that the receipts were ever taken as rent credits, explaining that a vast amount of the documentation amounts to supporting materials rather than deduction claims.

It will be hard for Good Jobs New York to counter that defense, since the presence of such receipts at the Parks Department does not a write-off make. The city Comptroller's office has yet to audit the Yankees' 2005 deductions, so Good Jobs New York has no smoking-gun document to show that the expenses cited were ever in fact deducted against the Yankees' rent credit.

by Liz Gunnison