CONCORD, N.H. – Pigs flew, lions slept with lambs – and No. 1 Yankee fan Rudy Giuliani miraculously transformed himself into a Red Sox fan on the eve of the World Series.
“I’m rooting for the Red Sox,” the Republican presidential contender Tuesday told a Boston audience, just a few T stops from Fenway Park.
“I’m an American League fan, and I go with the American League team, maybe with the exception of the Mets. Maybe that would be the one time I wouldn’t because I’m loyal to New York.”
Later in New Hampshire – a loyal dominion within New England’s Red Sox Nation and, more importantly to Giuliani, home of the first primary in 2008 – the former mayor expanded on his heresy.
“Somehow it makes me feel better if the team that was ahead of the Yankees wins the World Series,” he told a group of mostly local reporters in explaining his sudden backing of the Red Sox, “because then I feel like, well, we’re not that bad.”
Later, at a town hall meeting in Lebanon, N.H., Giuliani yukked it up with a couple of audience members who were wearing Sox caps.
“If I keep looking at that hat, I may start crying,” he said to chuckles, before adding, “Good luck to the Red Sox!”
Pundits immediately declared the comments a shameless play for votes from a man whose name is almost synonymous with Bronx Bomber – a big-game regular in the box seats next to the Yankee dugout.
While his words may have drawn appreciative nods from cocky Red Sox fans up north, the hometown crowd in New York was quick to call him out.
“The next time he goes to Yankee Stadium, we will boo,” vowed Charlie Egan, 36, a carpenter from Rockville Centre, L.I. “Yankee fans forget nothing.”
“He said that?” exclaimed a shocked Bob Herbert, 49, a Brooklyn maintenance worker. “He should be ashamed of himself.”
“He is doing what Hillary did,” Herbert added, referring to Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton, whom Giuliani mocked just last week for dividing her loyalty between the Yankees and the .National League Cubs of her native Chicago. “He is just doing it for votes.”
The former mayor’s comments come at a particularly trying time for Yankees fans, who saw their team blown out in the first round of playoffs and the end of manager Joe Torre’s storied 12-year reign. The Red Sox meet the Colorado Rockies in Game 1 of the World Series tonight.
The GOP front-runner insisted his sudden conversion to Red Sox fandom was “not just because I’m here in Massachusetts.”
“In Colorado, in the next week or two, you will see, I will have the courage to tell the people of Colorado the same thing, that I am rooting for the Red Sox in the World Series,” he said.
But the former mayor will still have the electoral math on his side. Colorado has a total of nine Electoral College votes, compared with about 30 in Red Sox Nation – Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Rhode Island and about half of Connecticut.
Aides to the former mayor later pointed out that Giuliani has expressed his support for the American League in general in the past, even if it meant rooting for the Red Sox.
And in a way, he’s going back to his Little League roots: He was a slugger on the 1954 Garden City South Red Sox.
Political experts said Giuliani risked being tagged as a pandering pol by talking up his new Red Sox leanings on the same day that he filed formal papers in the Granite State declaring himself a presidential candidate.
“He’s always teased Hillary Clinton about whether she’s a Cubs fan or a Yankees fan,” said Andrew Smith of the University of New Hampshire’s Survey Center. “So where does this leave him now?”
