Rudy the Yankee

We here at umpbump shy away of political controversy; the closest we got was when Senator Kerry got involved in the MLB Extra Innings deal and some of us expressed our, uhm, displeasure with the way he sucked in the ‘04 elections.

Well, guess what, election season is around the corner and, whadayaknow, baseball is suddenly part of it.

As some of you may know, Rudy Guliani made some controversial statements a few days ago, insinuating he had been a pivotal player in the search and rescue operations taking place in the World Trade Center ruins, and saying he had been there so long that, in a way, he could be considered one of the rescuers.

“This is not a mayor or a governor or a president who’s sitting in an ivory tower,” he said. “I was at ground zero as often, if not more, than most of the workers. I was there working with them. I was there guiding things. I was there bringing people there. But I was exposed to exactly the same things they were exposed to. So in that sense, I’m one of them.”

Here’s the vid:

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/wR8SPSA7ygA" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

Well the New York Times decided to examine how many hours the former NYC Mayor (and drag queen) did in fact, spend at the WTC site. Turns out, between Sept. 17 and Dec. 16, he only spent 29 hours there.

So Salon.com decidedo take it up a notch, and compare those figures and that time period with Rudy’s attendance record at Yankee stadium. Startling results:

By our count, Giuliani spent about 58 hours at Yankees games or flying to them in the 40 days between Sept. 25 and Nov. 4, roughly twice as long as he spent at ground zero in the 90 days between Sept. 17 and Dec. 16. By his own standard, Giuliani was one of the Yankees more than he was one of the rescue workers.

During three postseason playoff series that began Oct. 10, 2001, and ended Nov. 4, 2001, Giuliani attended every one of the team’s home games, with the possible exception of the third game of the American League Championship Series, for which Salon could not confirm his attendance. According to Salon’s arithmetic, Giuliani spent about 33 hours in stadiums — this includes two World Series games he watched in Phoenix — during the Yankees’ 2001 postseason run, four hours more than he spent at ground zero. (We do not know if he stayed for every pitch, but famed baseball writer Roger Angell described Giuliani in the the New Yorker as a “devout Yankee fan, a guy who stays on until the end of the game.”)

Giuliani also attended the first regular season game the Yankees played in New York after the attacks; that game lasted almost three hours.

There it is folks, the numbers don’t lie. Like I said, we’re not for political controversy here at Umpbump (or are we?) but it sure looks to me like Salon.com just Yankee-ied, if you will, Guiliani’s claim to fame with the search and rescue workers.