Hooray for Mayor Bloomberg. He single-handedly saved the Yankees from certain defeat against the Red Sox by helping to land pitcher Al Leiter (at least that’s the impression I had looking at the local front pages). Of course, skeptics will say that while Mr. Bloomberg may have made a few phone calls, the Yankees, with their depleted pitching staff, had already bid for Mr. Leiter’s services. Nevertheless, this is an election year and campaign staffers are on overtime digging up good news on all the candidates running for mayor.

Billionaire Bloomberg has already spent millions on his re-election bid, and his rising poll numbers seem to indicate that it’s money well spent. Polls, however, can be deceiving. The chatter I hear from former Bloomberg supporters who will not be voting for him in the GOP primary come September should boost the spirits of rival Thomas Ognibene.

Four of the five borough Republican county leaders have endorsed Mayor Bloomberg, with Queens the lone holdout. But some Staten Island Republicans have no intention of following their county leadership, and I am one of them.

A member of a fraternal organization on Staten Island told me the group has been harassed by the police department, that in the past year it has been fined $1,500 for a variety of minor offenses, such as a fruit fly being found in a liqueur bottle.

While Mr. Bloomberg may have collected $1,500, I fear he has lost hundreds of votes. Many residents of the south shore, which is not a high crime area, feel that they’ve been swamped by police officers looking not for criminals but for average citizens committing parking violations. Catching a criminal does not bring the city money, but parking summonses do.

A senior citizen friend from Bayside, Queens, Dorothy Wachsstock, is even more vehement about the mayor. She writes, “As a registered Republican, I never would have voted for Mayor Bloomberg without the endorsement of Mayor Giuliani. We all knew that he was really a Democrat and took the easy way to run for election without having to participate in a Democrat primary. Within a short time of his election, Mayor Bloomberg decided to become the father of all and put many people out of business with his smoking ban.

“Small family restaurants lost the business of the fathers at the bars, who used to have a drink and a cigarette while the family sat at the tables till the orders came. Even restaurants that had special places for smokers are quite empty. Thus, prices rose for the middle class who could not afford Tavern on the Green or such expensive places.

“It may not have affected the wealthy who dined in Manhattan, but it hurt the outer middle-class boroughs. Yet, when the mayor was at a party of elites and they were smoking cigars, he turned his back and told reporters that he didn’t see it. Ask the bar owner who received a ticket for an empty ashtray how he feels about Mayor Bloomberg.”

Renee Diaz of St. George said the mayor was more concerned with his legacy, spending a fortune hyping the West Side stadium and the Olympics, than caring about the little guys’ needs. She said she thought Mr. Bloomberg was a businessman who knew the danger of high taxes, and yet he’s raised taxes instead of cutting wasteful spending.

I agree, and one of my biggest complaints about Mr. Bloomberg is that he did not fight against the subway fare increase even though a judge ruled that the MTA had cooked the books. Nor did he heed the pleas of Brooklyn residents who warned that closing the firehouses in Williamsburg would endanger their lives. A mayor should be more concerned with the issues that matter to the little guy, not the acquisition of more tourist attractions.

Mr. Bloomberg has apparently also ticked off all of us in the anti-abortion movement, and many of us are registered Republicans. If Mr. Bloomberg plans to run again as a Republican, he may face a legitimate challenge from the only true conservative running, Mr. Ognibene.

He may not have Mr. Bloomberg’s millions, but he’s a native New Yorker. Despite the Leiter/Yankee hype, Bloomberg is from a suburb of … Boston.