(image courtesy of Newsday)

Look, I don’t like them any more than you do, generally. But in all seriousness, would you wish their new owner on anyone? Even your worst enemy?

I’m not sure.

What’s he said now? Oh, just that the Rays have no justification for retaliating against his Yankees because they’re the beneficiaries of revenue sharing.

“I don’t want these teams in general to forget who subsidizes a lot of them, and it’s the Yankees, the Red Sox, Dodgers, Mets,” he said to The New York Post. “I would prefer if teams want to target the Yankees that they at least start giving some of that revenue sharing and luxury tax money back. From an owner’s point of view, that’s my point.”

In case you missed the background, a Rays minor leaguer (Elliott Johnson) ran over a Yankee minor league catcher (Francisco Cervelli) at the plate in a hard but legitimate play, breaking the backstop’s wrist. Four days later, the always classy Yankee Shelley Duncan tried to spike Rays second baseman Akinori Iwamura in a hard and illegitimate play, prompting a real, live Simmons basebrawl.

As Olney says, none of the above is really that newsworthy: everyone’s acting as you might expect them to.

But what I hadn’t known was that the Rays were disqualified from defending themselves from eye high spikes, simply because their budget is an eighth of the Empire’s. Particularly if they “go after [Yankee] stars.” You know, as is traditional.

Thank Jebus Hankenstein is around to educate all of us on the subject, however. Otherwise those uppity Rays might think that, well, they’re an actual major league team that could actually compete with the Yankees. And we can’t have that.