Looking For Bling in All the Wrong Places

By virtually all accounts money is hard to come by these days. People are losing money on home sales, stores don’t have any due to lagging retail numbers, and penny pinching will only increase as job losses continue to soar.

The sob story of this past week bordered on the surreal as we learned that Wall Street guru Bernie Madoff lost $50 billion of other people’s money. (The stress must have done something to Madoff’s brain because the New York Times reported that days before being arrested, he actually invited two senior employees to his home to tell them his business was all a big scam.)

Let’s not forget that governors are trying to sell vacated Senate seats, and auto makers and giant lending institutions are asking for loans from Congress. Which, when you think about it, is absurd because Congress will only pull the funds from the public and, as mentioned earlier, the public doesn’t have any money, indicated by slipping home values, lagging retail sales and mounting job losses.

It’s getting so bad that a guy can’t even rob a pro shop with underwear on his head anymore.

But believe it or not, there’s someone these people could have turned to - a group that could have helped them all, if they had just thought to ask.

The New York Yankees.

In the midst of this economic black hole, the Yankees are, to use a term that’s well out of my 30-ish white guy vernacular, “making it rain.” Six hundred million-dollar contracts are being handed out to every free agent on the market, including to those that don’t even play baseball.

Instead of wasting their time in front of Congress, the big three automakers should have asked for a few billion from the Steinbrenners. Then in exchange, each company could have offered the team one of its automobiles and the Yankees could have been the first organization to welcome back the bullpen car.

If the governor of Illinois was so hard up for some dough, I’m sure the Yankees could have slipped him some under the table and then have taken control of the vacant Senate seat. Once in power they could permanently designate the Cubs as their Double A affiliate.

And Madoff could have benefited the most of all of them. All he had to do was get in front of the team’s general manager, Brian Cashman, and tell him that with a little money up front, he could create the appearance of magnificent returns without actually producing anything of real value or substance. The next thing you know, Bernie Madoff would have been the new Alex Rodriguez.

If only all these poor saps had realized this before stepping in it so deep. After all, the Yankees love to grant wishes. For the past eight years, they’ve been making dreams come true for everyone who lives outside of New York by not winning the World Series.

Thank you Yankees!