Happy Birthday Paul O'Neill - Feb. 25, 1963

Good morning everyone, and welcome to the many new subscribers who have joined in the past few days. Wednesdays are history day at Pinstripe People, so today we celebrate the 61st birthday of Paul O’Neill, one of the pillars of the franchise during the last Yankee dynasty who helped lead the Bombers to four World Series titles with his clutch hitting and fierce competitive nature. Lets get to it.

When the 1992 MLB season ended, Paul O’Neill wasn’t sure where his career was headed. Since 1988 he’d been a full-time starter with the Cincinnati Reds - the team he grew up rooting for during his youth in Columbus, Ohio - and five years later he may not have been a superstar, but he was a certainly a top flight major leaguer.

He helped the Reds to a stunning sweep of the powerful Oakland A’s in the 1990 World Series, and he earned an All-Star appearance in 1991 in a year when Reds manager Lou Piniella challenged him to pull the ball and hit more home runs.

O’Neill wasn’t thrilled because he considered himself a gap-to-gap line drive hitter, but he did what he was told and slugged a career-high 28, though he also saw his average fall to .256 and his strikeout total rise to 107 which would stand as his all-time high.

But then things unraveled in 1992 as O’Neill slipped to 14 homers and produced a career-worst .246 average and an anemic .373 slugging percentage. He was a bit lost and needed to recalibrate.

“My calling was never as a big home run hitter, and when I tried to be one, I fell flat on my face,” O’Neill said. “Never in my worst nightmares did I think that would bring my tenure with my beloved Reds to an end.” But that is exactly what happened.

Gene Michael, the Yankees general manager at the time, didn’t care about O’Neill’s home run totals or the poor 1992 season he endured. He loved the way O’Neill played the game, how he competed (even when he was smashing water coolers in the dugout), and he believed the lefty-swinging O’Neill could thrive in Yankee Stadium. He inquired about a trade and pulled one off that, at the time, raised some eyebrows around baseball.

Michael sent outfielder Roberto Kelly – three years younger than the 30-year-old O’Neill and a 1992 All-Star who was considered a key piece to the Yankees future – to Cincinnati for O’Neill and a minor-leaguer who never sniffed the majors.

In Bill Pennington’s great book Chumps to Champs, Michael explained his rationale this way.

“I had watched O’Neill play a lot, and to me, I felt sure he was coming into his prime,” Michael said. “I liked that he got riled up about making outs. I liked the passion. It could have been a mistake, but I was no longer sure that Roberto was going to blossom the way we had envisioned. We had to get more left-handed, and Paul was that piece. He was a good defender and had a good arm. He would get along with Donnie (Mattingly) and the other veterans, which was important. And he understood the New York media; that wouldn’t be a problem.”

Buck Showalter was the manager at the time, and he told Pennington, “Was it a ballsy trade? You bet. Shit, people thought we were panicking. But Stick had done his homework.”

O’Neill lit up in New York. He hit .311 with 20 homers in 1993, then won the AL batting title at .359 in the 1994 season that was disastrously wiped out by the players’ strike.

And that life was about to get quite remarkable starting in 1996 when O’Neill hit .302 with 19 homers and 91 RBI and helped lead the Yankees to their first AL pennant since 1981 and their first World Series title since 1978.

Over the five-year period from 1996 to 2000 when the Yankees won four World Series, O’Neill’s slash line was .302 average/.374 on-base/.476 slugging for an OPS of .850 as he hit 101 homers, 182 doubles, drove in 534 runs and struck out only 450 times in 3,272 plate appearances.

In the 1996 World Series, it was O’Neill’s spectacular running catch in right-center that saved the pivotal fifth game. With men on first and third and two outs and John Wetteland trying to close a nerve-wracking 1-0 victory, Luis Polonia hit a rope that would have won the game for Atlanta, but on sore legs, O’Neill somehow tracked it down.

“In Game 5 of the World Series in 1996, (Jose) Cardenal was trying to get his attention in right field to move him over and he’s doing this (O’Neill was practicing his swing),” Joe Torre told Andy Martino of SNY prior to O’Neill’s jersey retirement ceremony in 2022. “I’m saying, ‘You’re not going to hit again. I hope.’ Finally, Jose got his attention and moved him over and he caught the ball for the last out.”

Of that play, O’Neill said in the clubhouse recalling his thoughts when he saw where the ball was headed, “Oh my God might have gone through my mind a few times. When it kept going and going, that’s when my heart started pounding. Tino (Martinez) came up to me afterward and said the guy on first would’ve scored, too. I hadn’t even thought of that, but it kind of gave me a sick feeling.”

Two days later at Yankee Stadium, O’Neill doubled and scored the first run on Joe Girardi’s triple and the Yankees went on to a 3-2 Series-clinching victory. There is a picture of O’Neill jumping on the player pile that I had my niece, Morgan Schaefer, recreate in a drawing which I then used for the cover of my book The Last Dynasty: Yankees 1996-2000 which you can purchase by clicking this link.

After failing to defend their championship in 1997, the Yankees went on to win the next four AL pennants and three World Series and O’Neill was in the middle of it it all.

The magical run ended in 2001, a year in which O’Neill knew was going to be his last, and the fans at Yankee Stadium knew it, too. That’s why they serenaded him throughout the three games in the Bronx against Arizona with the chant “Paul O’Neill!” over and over.

He finally acknowledged them late in Game 5 - his last home game - with a tip of his cap and a tearful wave, and moments later he watched Scott Brosius hit a dramatic two-run homer in the bottom of the ninth to tie the game, and the Yankees went on to win it on Alfonso Soriano’s homer in the 12th.

Upon retirement after the Yankees lost the last two games in Arizona, the man who George Steinbrenner always called “my warrior” joined the fledgling YES Network in 2002 and has been a Yankees analyst ever since.

O’Neill’s Yankee career lasted nine years, 1,254 games and 5,368 plate appearances during which he produced 185 homers, 858 RBI, a slash line of .303/.377/.492 an OPS of .869, four championships, four All-Star Games, and his No. 21 retired in Monument Park.

“I always loved his passion, obviously,” Joe Torre told SNY prior to O’Neill’s number retirement. “You’d hear the noise - bang, bang, boom (when O’Neill would pound a water cooler after a frustrating out). I used to say to him, ‘It’s all well and good, but if you hurt yourself and you can’t play, I’m going to kill you.’

“Paul O’Neill never blamed anybody else. It was always himself. One day, he was mumbling to himself about finding another job, and (Don) Zimmer said, ‘I have a guy in the cinderblock business in Cincinnati.’ And Paul looked back and barked at Zim. That was always a keeper for me.”