The News-Observer’s Roger Van Der Horst describes local man Sean Bunn as “the Triangle’s most prominent member of Red Sox Nation”.  I’m not entirely sure how or why you’d want to measure such a thing, but apparently being the a widely recognized Boston fan in that neck of the woods is considered provocation enough.

Bunn got back Tuesday night from a fan get-together he organized at Hi5 in Raleigh to find Yankee pinstripes and the Yankees’ “NY” logo all over his condo. It was bad enough that the Sox had lost Game 4 of the American League Championship Series to the Tampa Bay Rays, a 13-4 pasting. The real kick in the gut: Bunn’s Boston memorabilia, anything with a Boston Red Sox logo, his television screens, an antique chair from his grandfather, other furniture, walls, carpeting, cabinets, shoes, his golf bag, all had been vandalized. In a destructive nod to history, the vandal or vandals painted “26-3” on one wall — apparently a botched reference to the Yankees’ number of World Series championships relative to those won by the Red Sox. (Any Red Sox fan would immediately protest the inaccuracy: Boston won not only in 1918, 2004 and 2007 but also in 1903, 1912, 1915 and 1916.)

Whoever broke into Bunn’s place — Raleigh police are investigating — even painted uniform numbers, the 13 worn by Alex Rodriguez and Derek Jeter’s No. 2, on the backs of Bunn’s dress shirts. (He is considering auctioning the shirts to raise money for the Jimmy Fund, the charitable arm of the Red Sox Foundation.)

“I don’t think it’s a typical fan at all, because they know how to spell ‘Yankees,’ ” Bryan Richardson, a friend of Bunn’s said in a telephone interview, referring to the “Yankes” painted on one wall. “It’s probably somebody who was not brought up a Yankee fan, maybe a young kid in high school or college who doesn’t understand the whole history.”

One lifelong Yankee fan suggested it may not have been a Yankee fan at all.

“It has to be a Red Sox fan trying to make us look bad,” said Hart Seely, who has a Yankee blog and edited the book “O Holy Cow! The Selected Verse of Phil Rizzuto.”