Despite Brief Concessions, Giuliani Determined in Yankee Devotion

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani has had a lifelong commitment to the Yankees. But listening to him announce his favorite for this year’s World Series made that easy to forget.

“I will be rooting for the Red Sox because I am an American League fan,” he told reporters in Boston, one game into this year’s Fall Classic.

But to some, the statement seemed to be a campaign ploy designed to win votes in New Hampshire, a state that hosts a wealth of Sox fans — and that also happens to be the location of the first presidential primary in the nation.

“Traitor!” the New York Daily News declared. “Redcoat!” said the New York Post. Even Sen. Fred Thompson’s (R-Tenn.) campaign joined the jeering, issuing a statement that said, “We thought Mayor Giuliani’s endorsement of Democrat Mario Cuomo [in 1994] was rooting for the other team, but for Yankee fans, this might be a new low.”

Giuliani may very well be flip-flopping for votes, but the strong reaction to his Sox endorsement suggests that this is about more than baseball loyalties. Giuliani is a candidate people expect to remain headstrong in his beliefs, making it surprising when he doesn’t. After all, this resolve is the crux of his platform and of his personality — Giuliani knows what he wants. And as much as that comes through in his stump speech and his political history, his relationship to baseball, and specifically to the Yankees, does so even more.

When Giuliani was growing up in Brooklyn, the land of the Dodgers, he made a choice that ostracized him from his own people — he rooted for the Yankees.

Giuliani often recounts how his father, Harold, a second-generation Italian-American and a fervent Yankees fan, once sent him outside into the hands of a gang of young Dodger fans wearing pinstripes.

The incident was his “proudest moment” because he stood up for his team, Giuliani told New York Times reporter John Tierney in 1995.

“I kept telling them: ‘I am a Yankee fan. I am a Yankee fan. I’m gonna stay a Yankee fan,’” Giuliani told Tierney. “This was a constant fight for me — go out and acquire statistics to prove that the Yankees were better than the Dodgers … it was like being a martyr: I’m not gonna give up my religion. You’re not gonna change me.”

As Peter J. Boyer wrote in a recent profile of Giuliani in The New Yorker, Harold Giuliani was an intense disciplinarian who often preached strong values to his son. The Dodgers incident and the influence of his father seem to have shaped Giuliani’s future both as a diehard Yankees fan and as a politician.

“I think it was an early lesson about keeping your convictions,” said professor Stanley Renshon, coordinator of the Interdisciplinary Program in the Psychology of Social and Political Behavior at the City University of New York. “If there’s one thing that you can say about Rudy that’s very obvious, it’s that he has a very combative psychology, and while that’s got some strong points, in some situations it’s a drawback.”

As mayor, Giuliani attended each of the Yankees’ 40 postseason home games, wearing his classic Pinstripes cap. When the team won World Series titles in 1996, 1998, 1999 and 2000, he celebrated with them on the field and in the clubhouse.

“When Giuliani was mayor and the Yankees won the World Series, he was in the right place at the right time,” Yankee fan Herb Ellis of New Jersey told Scoop08 at a recent Yankees-Red Sox game. “Because of those victories, a lot of people have seen him in the limelight, so they associate him with victory in general.”

If publicized more, Giuliani’s pinstripes would have a mostly humanizing effect, predicts George Vecsey, a New York Times sports columnist.

“If I were giving him advice, I’d say ‘wear your dang Yankee cap everywhere you go,’” Vecsey said. “I think it would help him. Not because they’re the Yankees, but because they’re a team. The fact that he cares about his team and gets this goofy smile on his face, that’s pretty human.”

Throughout his tenure as mayor, Giuliani supported his team, negotiating with Yankees principal owner George Steinbrenner to subsidize a new stadium and fighting to keep the facility in New York, though the plan wasn’t finalized until after Giuliani left office. According to reports at the time, he also spent $71 million on a new Staten Island plan, which included a stadium for the Yankees’ minor league team, and he threw the ceremonial first pitch on opening day.

But some critics say Giuliani took his relationship with the Yankees too far, acquiring perks beyond what the average citizen could afford. There were the box seats by the dugout — seats the Giuliani campaign says the mayor paid for himself unless he was there “on business.” There were multiple gifts of Yankees paraphernalia, a former Giuliani aide told The Village Voice, and also four diamond-and-gold World Series championship rings — worth an estimated total of $200,000 — that usually only go exclusively to team members and coaches. Giuliani paid just $16,000 for the rings, placing them far over the $50 gift value cap for New York public officials, the Voice reported.

These accusations aren’t particularly new. When he was associate attorney general at the Justice Department 25 years ago, Giuliani ran afoul of a Washington Post columnist who questioned his ownership of a valuable seat from the original Yankee stadium. In response, Giuliani claimed the seat had been a gift from an assistant who bought it for just $26.11.

While some disapprove of Giuliani’s gifts and free radio time on the Yankees Entertainment and Sports network, many Americans outside of New York do not know the depth of his commitment to the Yankees. If he is elected president, however, he may want to broadcast that relationship more consistently in light of his recent Red Sox kick, however temporary it may be.