Article: Tyler O’Neill’s Underoos

[Davy Andrews]

Tyler O'Neill's breakout 2024 season was revealing, in more ways than one.

The most memorable play of the 2024 Red Sox season happened just a few weeks ago, on September 12. It wasn’t a walk-off homer, a miraculous diving stop, or a game-saving home run robbery. It was a routine double to the gap in right-center off the bat of Tyler O’Neill. It didn’t result in a run, and it came just one inning before the Red Sox would get walked off in the 10th inning for the second day in a row. O’Neill didn’t even hit the ball particularly hard. If it hadn’t been perfectly placed between Aaron Judge and Juan Soto, it likely would have been a routine fly ball. But it was perfectly placed, and though Judge hustled to cut the ball off before the warning track, O’Neill cruised into second with a casual popup slide. Something else popped up too.

O’Neill’s left pant leg rode up all the way to his upper thigh, exposing the blue compression pants that he wears under his uniform. Any time the hulking O’Neill slides, it creates an unstoppable-force-meets-immovable-object type of situation, with the ground as the immovable object and O’Neill’s bulging haunches playing the role of the unstoppable force. Caught in the middle are this season’s transparent uniform pants, manufactured by Fanatics to have the structural integrity of a whisper. Those flimsy britches never stand a chance, and all season long they’ve seemed to know it. Any time O’Neill has slid into second, they’ve evacuated at the first sign of danger, seeking sanctuary up around his bikini zone.

We’ve seen a lot of O’Neill’s upper thighs this season, which is a weird thing to type. But what makes it even weirder is that no one else in baseball seems to have this particular problem. All season long, the rest of the league has dealt with tissue-paper thin pants that allow the viewers at home glimpses of tags and bulges and inseams; pants that spontaneously shred themselves the moment a baserunner so much as thinks about sliding. Just ask Freddie Freeman, who stole second base with a sprint speed of approximately negative six miles per hour on Saturday, and in the process seemed to open up some kind of portal to another dimension in his pants.

That’s what this year’s pants do. They rip. O’Neill is the only player in the league whose pants constantly ride all the way up to his groin when he slides. Actually, I take that back. He doesn’t even have to slide for this to happen. Even if O’Neill just runs hard, his pants start creeping inexorably upward. It's as if they have some sort of debilitating phobia that leaves them deathly afraid of the human knee.

While I can’t say exactly what’s going on to make O’Neill’s pants do this, the fact it’s not happening to anyone else indicates that he could solve it if he wanted to. Therefore, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that he doesn’t want to solve this problem. And you know what? I get it. O’Neill has a solid argument for the most jacked player in all of baseball, and if I had to guess, I would say that he makes that argument in his head once a week while doing hammer curls in front of a mirror. You don’t get muscles like those unless you want them badly enough to put in a whole lot of work. If I had quads like O’Neill’s, I’m sure I’d want to show them off too. What makes it even more fun is that the red-blue color pattern matches identically the pattern of Superman’s tights. When he slides into second base, it looks more than a little bit like O’Neill has stuffed his bemuscled frame into superhero pajamas.

If O’Neill ends up signing elsewhere this offseason, there will be plenty of reasons to miss him. He’s always been a great defender, and despite battling through injuries, he became one of just three Red Sox to put up a 30-homer game in this decade. But no matter which of this season’s Red Sox end up playing elsewhere next season, we've seen a whole lot more of O'Neill than just about anybody else. Consequently, there will be a whole lot more of him to miss.

 

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