NEW YORK — For Paul O’Neill, hiding his veneration for the Yankees is nearly impossible.
“It’s hard to let it all sink in,” O’Neill said during his virtual press conference on Wednesday a day after the team announced they would retire his number. “Every day I wake up and say, ‘Did this really happen?’ It really means that much.”
The Yankees announced on Tueday that O’Neill’s No. 21 would join No. 2, No. 3, No. 7 and all of the other iconic numbers in Yankee history on the retired jersey wall this season. The ceremony, scheduled for Aug. 21, will make the left-handed hitter the 23rd player or manager to receive the honor.
O’Neill said that when he was traded from Cincinnati in 1993 the first thing he noticed was “the history and the pride of the Yankees.” He made the obligatory pilgrimage to Monument Park (where he was given his own plaque in 2014) and met legendary Yankees of the past like Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra. A batting title, playoff berth and four World Series titles in five years came quickly after that, earning O’Neill his ironclad status in the Bronx.
“It’s the highest honor that I’ve ever been given in baseball,” O’Neill said of his number being retired. “I don’t really know how to explain it. It’s on my mind all day, and it keeps replaying over and over again, just how cool this is.”
In recent years, not only has O’Neill watched his former teammates Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera get inducted into the Hall of Fame, he’s also seen other members of those late-’90s teams like Bernie Williams, Andy Pettitte and Jorge Posada get their numbers retired as well. The success of those teams may very well never be matched again. Since 2000, when the Yankees completed their three-peat, no team has won back-to-back rings, and only four other franchises (the 2008-09 Phillies, 2010-11 Rangers, 2014-15 Royals and 2017-18 Dodgers) have even qualified for consecutive World Series.
“It’s an honor to be known as part of those teams from the late-’90s,” O’Neill said. “To know that there’s a generation of people who associate my name with that number, to me, is very special.”
O’Neill’s last MLB game was Game 7 of the 2001 World Series. Since then, LaTroy Hawkins is the only other Yankee to wear No. 21 in a regular-season game, though Todd Frazier infamously requested to wear it and was denied when he was traded to the team in 2017. With such a long period between O’Neill’s retirement and his number retirement, many wondered if it would ever happen at all, even with the team bizarrely refusing to issue it. According to O’Neill himself, the possibility that his number would ever get retired did not cross his mind while he was playing.
“These are things that you never dream about,” O’Neill gushed. “When you’re playing the game you don’t think about these things. You think about getting a hit or hitting a home run. Those kind of go away. This, to me, now that I think about it, every single time I go into Yankee Stadium and that number is up, it won’t go away.”
O’Neill has certainly been at Yankee Stadium a lot since hanging up his cleats. This season will be, fittingly, O’Neill’s 21st season as a broadcaster for YES Network. While the pandemic forced him to start broadcasting games from his home, he says he still feels an unbreakable bond with the Yankee diehards.
“I’ve always been thankful to the New York fans,” O’Neill shared. “They’ve treated me unbelievably. The cool thing about the Yankees is it doesn’t matter where you are. It’s not just New York, it’s this whole country of fans that have followed this team and the tradition. I can’t emphasize enough how much this organization has meant to me.”
The 58-year-old says he always has a chuckle when he sees someone walking around at a ballgame in his No. 21 jersey, a number that he says was inspired by watching Roberto Clemente as a kid. That number is now part of Yankee history forever, belonging to the man George Steinbrenner nicknamed The Warrior for the rest of time.
