Now, however, there has come what is for many the true unpardonable insult: Mr. Giuliani has declared he will be rooting for the dreaded Boston Red Sox against the Colorado Rockies in the World Series, which began last night. From the Bronx to his childhood haunts in Brooklyn, there was a baffled anger bordering on rage.

“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.”

. . .

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.

. . .

Of course, his most revealing comment on the subject was perhaps the answer he provided to The Providence Journal in Rhode Island when asked, this June, if he would agree to be president if it hinged on his becoming a Red Sox fan.

According to several experienced campaign observers, Bloomberg has a few months to continue laying low, periodically bursting into the news and then issuing his presidential denials. He cannot be coy, and he cannot let the anticipation morph into expectation. There is much he can learn — though he probably does not need to be taught — from the experience of Fred Thompson, the former Tennessee senator and “Law & Order” district attorney, who toyed with the idea for so long that the story had already become stale by the time he declared.

When asked yesterday about an alleged attempt to steal $450,000 from his personal account, the mayor took a shot at the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, which is handling the case.

“No. 1, it was a few months ago,” he snipped. “Why the district attorney chose to put it out now? It must have been a quiet news cycle.”

For the record, the DA’s office put out its press release on Tuesday, the first day one of the suspects appeared in court.

Bloomberg also scoffed at the suspects, whose alleged half-million-dollar theft attempt represents a tiny portion of his estimated $13.6 billion fortune.

The mayor, who remains the firm’s majority owner, has maintained that he has had nothing to do with the company’s day-to-day operations since he was elected in 2001, and a company spokeswoman strongly denied any suggestion that Mr. Bloomberg was involved.

However, a motion filed yesterday by the women, who have accused the company of discriminating against them after they became pregnant, contends that the mayor is in touch with Lex Fenwick, the company’s chief executive, and discussed complaints of mistreatment of female executives with Mr. Fenwick.

The lawsuit, filed by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, is the latest and most sweeping of a string of discrimination and sexual harassment complaints filed since the 1990s by individuals against Bloomberg L.P., the media and financial services giant.

One of the plaintiffs in the federal lawsuit, Janet Loures, says in the motion that she attended a company meeting last month about a Bloomberg service known as People Product during which a senior manager stated: “Mike calls Lex all the time about People Product — he probably shouldn’t, but he does.”

At the same time, a review of the city’s budget since 1980 shows that Mr. Bloomberg has been presiding over one of the greatest expansions of city government since the John V. Lindsay administration, fueled by an extraordinary surge in real estate revenues, both from higher property taxes and transfer taxes from sales.

Since Mr. Bloomberg took office in 2002, the city budget, adjusted for inflation, has swelled faster than it has under any other mayor during the last 27 years, increasing by 23 percent, to $60 billion.