Me and My Dad: A Baseball Memoir – A Tribute to a Father's Love and the Yankees Championship Career He Inspired($10.23Value)

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Paul O'Neill was the undisputed heart and soul of the four-time World Series-winning New York Yankees from 1993 to 2001. O'Neill epitomized the team's motto of hard work and good sportsmanship, traits instilled in him by his friend, confidant, lifelong model, and biggest fan: his dad, Chick O'Neill. In Me and My Dad , O'Neill writes from the heart about the man who inspired in him a love for the game and a determination to always play his best. O'Neill remembers the highlights of his own amazing career: the Cincinnati Reds calling him up to the majors, his first World Series, being traded to the Yankees -- and taking part in their recent championship wins. He also reflects on his father's untimely death during the 1999 World Series and on the farewell tribute his fans gave him during his last game in Yankee Stadium. “Most baseball books take you into the locker room. This book took me into Paul O’Neill’s heart. For all of us who love the game and love our dads, this is the book for us.” - Billy Crystal Paul O'Neill was the undisputed heart and soul of the four-time World Series-winning New York Yankees from 1993 to 2001. O'Neill epitomized the team's motto of hard work and good sportsmanship, traits instilled in him by his friend, confidant, lifelong model, and biggest fan: his dad, Chick O'Neill. In Me and My Dad , O'Neill writes from the heart about the man who inspired in him a love for the game and a determination to always play his best. O'Neill remembers the highlights of his own amazing career: the Cincinnati Reds calling him up to the majors, his first World Series, being traded to the Yankees -- and taking part in their recent championship wins. He also reflects on his father's untimely death during the 1999 World Series and on the farewell tribute his fans gave him during his last game in Yankee Stadium. Paul O'Neill was a right fielder for the New York Yankees. A frequent announcer and commentator on the YES Network, he lives in Cincinnati, Ohio. Burton Rocks is the author of three previous sports-related books. He lives in Stony Brook, New York. Me and My Dad By O'Neill, Paul Perennial ISBN: 0060595795 Chapter One Family Man Being the youngest of the six O'Neill children ultimately turned out to be one of the luckiest things that ever happened in my baseball career. But as I was growing up, it was often a double-edged sword, in more ways than one. When it came to learning about family history, being last in line meant I got mostly hand-me-downs, bits and pieces of stories Dad might tell in his offhanded, by-the-way manner, and other, longer versions filtered through my older siblings who, naturally, knew more than I did about everything . But what I did figure out at a very young age was that we had the potential to become a third generation of professional baseball players that had started with Dad's father, Art O'Neill, who played in the minor leagues in the early 1900s. Grandpa Art's father, great-grandfather John O'Neill, was a Nebraska homesteader who had married Mary Clemens, possibly a cousin to Samuel Clemens, alias Mark Twain. My mother, guardian and patron saint of the part of our education that wasn't about sports, must have been glad that this literary influence in our ancestry on Dad's side was as much in our blood as baseball was. Later that turned out to be the case, when two out of the six of us -- Molly and Robert -- took up the pen professionally. In the meantime our sports genes were of much more interest to me. Grandpa Art, born in the late 1800s, grew up in a time when professional baseball was in its infancy. Though the National League had been around since the 1870s, the American League was formed only in 1901; the general public was just beginning to catch on. For a young man like Art O'Neill, working hard, long hours as a foreman in charge of the Omaha Grain Elevator in South Ravenna, playing ball could only be an amateur interest -- squeezed into whatever little time was left over in the workweek. But fate intervened when the grain elevator closed for the harvest in 1909, and my grandfather, with a growing family to support, was forced to find a money-paying job for which he was qualified. As it so happened, he was a darn good baseball player and within no time he was making headlines in the April 12, 1909, edition of the Ravenna Times , which reported that "Art O'Neill signed for seventy-five dollars a month to play baseball out in Billings, Montana." Grandpa Art's stint in the minors coincided with a critical change in baseball that took place in 1911, when the adoption of a ball that had a cork center dramatically increased the potential for high-flying hits and home runs. Before that time the so-called dead ball first used in the game limited the frequency of home runs, forcing batters to rely on mental strategy, bunts, and base stealing. With the more aerodynamic ball, a whole new realm of competition opened up, and crowds began flocking to b