The so-called New York Yankees fan is cheering for the Boston Red Sox in the World Series.
“They should burn his seat that he sat in at Yankee Stadium — how’s that?” said George Patsin, a Brooklyn restaurateur. “They should burn it on TV so I can watch.”
It would seem that the timing is particularly galling to the faithful in New York. Bad enough that Joe Torre, the manager, is gone. Bad enough that half the team might follow. But Rudy cheering for Pedroia and Ortiz? It was, in short, too much.
“The word I’d use is ‘stunned,’” said Freddy Schuman, who for nearly 20 years has been showing up at Yankee games and banging on a frying pan with spoons. “I tell ya, I just can’t understand how a Yankee fan like him would all the sudden go for the Red Sox. It must be politics. I don’t get it. How do you do a thing like that?”
The betrayal hurts the more because if one were forced to pick the premiere New York fan, Mr. Giuliani would top the list.
He is a fan’s fan — a man whose very organs are likely etched with pinstripes. As mayor of New York, he used to wear his cap to City Hall. He is known to schedule political events so as not to miss a ballgame in the Bronx.
He once told Diane Sawyer he was fairly certain that God himself was rooting for the team.
By way of explanation, Mr. Giuliani couched his shift in loyalty as support for the American League. (“I’m an American League fan and I go with the American League team,” he told reporters — not coincidentally — in the primary state and Boston neighbor of New Hampshire.) “I thought he was loyal to New York,” said Kebrae H. Scott, 30, a maintenance worker who wore a Yankees cap as he was heading to his home in the Ebbets Fields Apartments in Brooklyn near where Mr. Giuliani grew up.
While it’s clear that fans develop an allegiance not just to a ball club, but a league, the Yankee-Red Sox rivalry is so embittered it’s hard to imagine any situation in which a fan of Mr. Giuliani’s stature could root for the sworn enemy of a beloved hometown team.