from the New York Daily News
Sunday, July 29, 2001
By Mike Lupica
He has played more than 1,000 games now in right field for the Yankees, and only Babe Ruth and Hank Bauer ever played more. Paul O'Neill is out there for nine seasons now, which means longer than Roger Maris was, almost twice as long as Reggie Jackson. He has won as many World Series with the Yankees as Maris and Jackson combined. He won one with the Reds before he got here.
O'Neill came here understanding the job description for great Yankees, the first time he went to right and stood where Ruth once stood. You better win the game.
And before he won anything here, O'Neill is one of the Yankees who came here in the 1990s and changed everything, changed history at the Stadium and made more. He is one of the six Yankees — along with Derek Jeter, Bernie Williams, Andy Pettitte, Mariano Rivera, Tino Martinez — who played in all the World Series since '96, and is still here. O'Neill is 38. He still has a temper. He isn't the hitter he was, rarely is No.3 in the order anymore. He is a great Yankee and still here, and when he is gone, the Yankees will not look the same.
This isn't about a good game Friday, or a good game the day before that, or the way he has started to hit again lately. It isn't about this season. It is about all of them with O'Neill.
"He has been such a passionate part of this," Joe Torre said on Friday, even before O'Neill went out and got four hits in his first four times up. "There's no facade. He deeply loves this game. Never cares what it looks like."
O'Neill, of course, never changes. Between a good game Thursday and an even better one in Toronto, he says, "Three hits in four days and I'm great again. That (stuff) frustrates me."
Sometimes it seems everything does and everything always has. He is 38 and still acts like the Little League kid who can't believe the ump called that pitch a strike, or can't believe he could make an out. But in what is clearly the proud twilight of his Yankee career, no one knowing for sure if he will have his job in right field next season, he plays the game at a fierce, high level. At his age, he might steal 30 bases this season. If he goes out, he goes out hard.
"He is," a Yankee fan I know, a big one, said the other day, "one of the guys off this team we're all going to miss the most, especially some night in October when we need a run."
He was in that group with Mike Stanley and Wade Boggs and Jimmy Key and Don Mattingly, all of them playing for Buck Showalter, in those days when the character of the current team was really shaped. Bernie Williams grew up alongside him in the outfield. Then everybody except Bernie was gone and O'Neill was still here, still playing right field for the Yankees, still batting .300 and knocking in 100 and wanting to win as much as any of them.
He looked washed up at the start of last year's playoffs and everybody wanted Torre to bench him. Torre dropped him in the batting order, but stayed with him. And when it was the Yankees against the Mets in the World Series, O'Neill was hitting again, hitting all over the place, singles and doubles and even triples. Maybe he turned a whole World Series around in the very first game when he worked Armando Benitez for that walk, worked him for what felt like 12 rounds in the ninth inning, changed the ninth inning and Game 1 and the Subway Series.
"I was just trying to get on base anyway I could," he said afterward.
After not being able to hit anything, after looking terrible against the A's especially, he hit .474 in the Series and was as much an MVP candidate as Derek Jeter. And got himself another season in right. Torre was right about him last October, of course. If you weren't going to war with O'Neill, after everything he had been for the Yankees, everything he had meant, then who?
"You don't get old and retire-able all of a sudden," Torre said Friday.
He probably won't get back to 100 RBI again, but you never know. O'Neill has a way of coming on at the end. He is back up around .280 again. He is hitting the ball to all fields again. Somehow he has made his legs look young again. It doesn't mean that he's great again. It doesn't mean the Yankees won't go looking for a big bat and end one of the long, honorable outfield runs in the history of the team. But he is a huge part of what they are trying to do now and a huge part of everything they've done and no one could have known when he came here for Roberto Kelly that he would become such an essential part of Yankee history. Tommy Henrich was called "Old Reliable" once, during his long run in the Yankee outfield. It is O'Neill now.
"I don't put too much stock on anything until the end of the year," he said.
He was asked about these good games he is having and said, "I can think back to last week when I gave away this at-bat or that one. That's the way I've always been."
He looks bad running to first sometimes, pouting about this bad at-bat or that one. He looks bad when he acts out in the dugout. You get the whole package, deal with it.
He hasn't been the biggest star of these Yankees, or close. But he will be the first of this grand group of champions, the October Six, to retire. Not the fastest of them, not the best, not the most glamorous. Just the first to Monument Park someday.
