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Originally Posted by westofyou
And you're forgetting that Paul O'Neil was born and raised in Columbus and still lives there... that still gives the Reds a chance of getting out of the TV hole they've dug for themselves.
A man can dream can't he?
Plus I don't see Kitty or Murcer leaving soon.
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True enough. Plus Waite Hoyt announced Reds games. Though I can't imagine Steinbrenner would ever allow O'Neill to stray to another organization. The man is like a religious artifact for that franchise.
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Originally Posted by tsj017
Yeah, that's the thing that I still have trouble grasping. He'll probably have a monument out there with the Babe, Gehrig, Dimaggio, etc.
A few years back, when he went to the plate in Yankee Stadium for the final time in a postseason game, the Yankee fans--demanding, difficult and accustomed to excellence--stood and chanted his name.
Not that he didn't deserve it--he was a very good player for the Yanks and got a handful of World Series rings--but it was and is hard to square that with the player he was with the Reds.
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A big part of it was that no matter how much Yankees fans demanded of O'Neill, he always demanded more of himself. That's huge in that town. Yankees fans almost immediately recognized that the pressure of playing in New York was nothing compared to the pressure of being Paul O'Neill and they loved him for it. I've got a friend from New York who despises the Yankees and pretty much everyone who's ever work that team's jersey. Yet even he adored O'Neill because the guy was the quintessential New York ballplayer.
In Cincinnati, it didn't go over well when he kicked a baseball. The reponse in New York would be something like, "Kick it? He should have shot it." And New Yorkers never doubted that, if issued a handgun, Paul O'Neill
would have shot a baseball or his bat or a water cooler or whatever other inanimate object on which he chose to vent his righteous anger.