The Case Is Clothes: O’Neill Fits Right In

It was known in baseball lore as “the power of the pinstripes” and there was almost something supernatural about it.

What happened was, every time the New York Yankees reached out and dealt for a journeyman ballplayer, he would put on the distinctive Yankee pinstripes and immediately become a Hall of Fame candidate.

It happened too often to be coincidence, but I leave you with Exhibit A: In 1959, a moderately successful Kansas City outfielder named Roger Maris hit 16 home runs. The Yankees got him for next to nothing and within two years he hit more home runs in a season, 61, than anyone ever had in the history of baseball, including Babe Ruth. Maris hit 100 homers in his first two years as a Yankee.

That kind of thing happened all the time. It was as if these guys had stepped into a phone booth and came out with Superman’s cape.

What brings this up is, I went down to the dugout in Anaheim Stadium the other night to look up the Yankees’ Exhibit B.

The French have an expression, “Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose,” or, “The more things change, the more they are the same.”

Take Paul O’Neill, for example. Paul was not exactly a journeymen with the Cincinnati Reds, but neither was he Ty Cobb when the Yankees got him for part-time outfielder Roberto Kelly.

O’Neill hit .246 in 1992, his last year in Cincinnati. In his first year in Yankee pinstripes, he hit .311. In two seasons--shades of Maris!--he was leading the league in hitting with .359.

Paul O’Neill belongs in a Yankee uniform. First of all, there’s that size--6 feet 4. Somehow, Yankees always seem bigger than the rest of baseball. Big, powerful, ready to run you over, they never have any bat manipulators, tricksters, speedsters in their lineup. They look the part.

And they always have players like Paul O’Neill. You get the eerie feeling, you want to look at him and say, “Uh, er, how tall were you before you became a Yankee?”

It’s perfect casting. You look at O’Neill and you see a whole line of players like that--Tommy Henrich, Charlie Keller, George Selkirk, even Maris. They’re a type. Born-to-be-a-Yankee type of thing. The Yankees always have a Paul O’Neill in right field. They clone them.

He’s not “Old Reliable,” or “King Kong Keller,” or “The Yankee Clipper” or “The Iron Horse,” but he fits the legacy as well as any of them.

So, I thought I’d check and see how being a Yankee made all that difference.

O’Neill thought about it a moment. He is, ordinarily, serious as a monk, and he gave the question some reflection.

“Well,” he acknowledged, “playing in New York is supposed to be the greatest pressure of all. But, at Cincinnati, I was playing too close to home [Columbus, Ohio]. My family and friends were always there and I found I was putting too much stress on myself.”

Yeah, but New York! The Big Apple and all. Sinatra singing, taxis honking, the press biting.

“Oddly, I can relax better in New York. New York fans are true fans. They know the game and demand your best. It’s motivating to play in all that history. Actually, I count my blessings that I can play the game in New York and be glad God gave me the ability to play this game at this level.”

But isn’t the real secret of the pinstripe mystique that you get on a team with better hitters and the opposing pitchers have more pressure on them and you get better pitches to hit? After all, Ruth had Lou Gehrig hitting behind him, Maris had Mickey Mantle, and “Murderers’ Row” had eight guys who could disable a pitcher for you.

“True, it’s great to come over here and have a lineup like this. We don’t rely on any one person. It’s fun to be on a team with this many outstanding players and be hitting behind a guy like Tino [Martinez]. But we had a great team offensively in Cincinnati when I was there. We won the World Series four straight [in 1990]. We had Eric Davis, Barry Larkin, Chris Sabo.”

Tino Martinez is almost another pinstripe make-over, although he did hit 31 home runs his last year in Seattle. In the stripes, he already has 40 this year with the Yankees.

There are those who think the dimensions of Yankee Stadium have more to do with newcomers’ success than the design of their uniforms--the right-field fence over which Maris regularly plopped 301-foot home runs--as did Ruth.

O’Neill shakes his head.

“Yankee Stadium is not an ideal configuration for me,” he says. “I am a gap hitter. It’s still 399 feet out to left-center and 385 feet out to right-center.”

His manager, Joe Torre, suggests, “If he’d change his technique to pull the ball more, he’d hit 35 or more homers a year.”

So, it’s not the pinstripes, it’s the guy in them. Pinstripes don’t help you any more than they help the secretary of state unless he has the firepower to back them up.

O’Neill is batting .325 with 18 homers and 101 runs batted in. As long as he keeps those numbers up, the Yankees don’t care if he plays in a dress.