09:39 AM EDT on Friday, September 30, 2005

BY MARK ARSENAULT
Journal Staff Writer

PROVIDENCE -- They are a mere 11 percent of our state population, according to a Brown University poll, yet everybody seems to know one.

Yankees fans.

In Rhode Island, Louis DiLullo could be their king.

Though raised in Providence, breathing the same air as everybody else and drinking the same sparkling nectar of Scituate Reservoir, DiLullo, 45, developed acute inoperable Yankeeitus, which has manifested itself in a Web site, Yankeetradition.com , which he maintains to further the glory of the New York Yankees, baseball's highest-paid team. (OK, the one with the most championships, too.)

Last year was tough for people of the pinstripe persuasion.

DiLullo was there: Yankee Armageddon. Game 7, the Bronx, as the Red Sox built a 10-3 lead in the final game of the American League Championship Series, and the hometown fans, who could stomach no more of the train wreck unfolding on their beloved bluegrass, bolted the ballpark early.

"It was sickening," DiLullo says, recalling the exodus. If Yankees fans abandoning hope in Game 7 wasn't bad enough, the Red Sox fans in the nosebleed sections of Yankee Stadium took advantage and upgraded themselves to better seats. The Boston fans made a racket; they really let the local die-hards have it. "They took over the stadium. It was like being in Fenway Park."

Photo courtesy of Louis DiLullo

Warren Rosenberg, left, of New York City, roots for the Red Sox, and Loius DiLullo, right, of providence, roots for the Yankees. Pictued at Yankee Stadium, the two have become friends over the past few years and have attended about 10 games together.

DiLullo, self-employed at General Tool & Supply Co. in Attleboro, is a Yankees season-ticket holder. He commutes to some 50 games a year in New York. After an evening game, he often doesn't get home to Providence until 3:45 a.m.

DiLullo has followed the Yankees from the moment he glimpsed Mickey Charles Mantle, in 1967, during Mantle's second-to-last season, he says. That gives DiLullo more fan credentials than those who crowded the bandwagon in the 1990s, when the Yanks built their most recent dynasty.

He won't be at Fenway this week for the season-ending collision of the Red Sox and Yankees. No, he'll watch those games with the TV volume off and the Yankees play-by-play on the radio. That's his home-alone ritual. (He's single, of course, he says. "How else could I go to 50 games a year?")

Sometimes the Yankees radio and the TV broadcast are as much as two seconds out-of-synch, he says, which is annoying, though not as annoying as pro-Red Sox announcers.

When he attends games, DiLullo has been known "to pray a little bit" for the Yankees to prevail.

Does prayer work?

"Sometimes it does . . . I see other people doing it, too."

He says season-ticket holders in his section will remind him when the Yanks are falling: Pray!

After the Sox won the World Series last year, DiLullo's Web site became an Internet magnet for scorn from pent-up Boston fans, he says.

For his part, DiLullo took to reminding Red Sox fans that in the past 86 years, the Sox have won half as many titles as the Florida Marlins, an expansion team born in 1993.

"One more and you tie them," he noted, for those keeping score.

When it comes to counting titles, Yankees fans keep score.