Slugger Tyler O’Neill Can Laugh About Home Run That Wasn’t

TORONTO—Tyler O’Neill has hit a lot of home runs.

He hit 24 in the Southern League last year, good for second-most in the circuit. In four years as a pro, the 21-year-old outfielder has 70 homers. He hit three more in 72 Arizona Fall League at-bats. O’Neill has had even more with Team Canada, as a member of the Junior National Team, and more recently with the senior squad at the Pan Am Games and Premier 12.

But the most memorable is the homer that wasn’t.

It happened in Taichung, Taiwan, two Novembers ago. O’Neill and his Team Canada teammates were trying to follow their gold-medal-winning performance from the Pan Am Games across the world at the inaugural Premier 12, beginning with some exhibition play.

“At least it wasn’t during the actual tournament, we’ll put it that way,” the Mariners’ No. 2 prospect said.

There’s no box score to be found, but O’Neill’s teammates—some of whom were on hand Saturday as O’Neill accepted the Alumni Award at Baseball Canada’s National Teams Awards Banquet and Fundraiser—were happy to recall the events of the game.

“I don’t know if I had the best view of this or not, but we’re in the sixth or seventh inning and it’s his third at-bat and he hits a ball to left field,” said lefthander Andrew Albers, now with the Braves. “Big ballpark, the ball wasn’t traveling overly well, but he hit it pretty well and we were all in the dugout and we see the guy come down with the ball and we’re like, ‘Holy smokes, what a catch.’ He was running, ran all the way to the track, just in front of the wall, and caught it on the run.

“We’re looking at O’Neill and he just continues to round the bases. He hits first, hits second, and we’re thinking OK, he’s just coming back to the dugout the long way. Then he touches third and keeps going to home and we’re all just wondering what’s going on. Then as he’s coming home we realize that he thought it went out. So there were a few of us in there who were just starting to die laughing and we decide we’re going with this.”

Former Blue Jays lefthander Scott Diamond, headed to play in Korea for the upcoming season, offered his perspective: “Let’s be honest, he was absolutely as clutch as anyone else on that team during that tournament, but the best story about Tyler O’Neill in Taiwan was the exhibition game—luckily for him—when we were playing Mexico. He gets into this ball and hits it off his bat and he stands, walks, kind of pimps it off a little bit and throws his bat . . .

“So he’s jogging and the guy caught it when he was about halfway between first and second, and he continued to run around the bases the whole time. Rob Ducey was our third base coach and he has his hand out, pointing to the outfielder, trying to indicate he was out and Tyler bumps it like he thinks he’s telling him, ‘Good job.’ He comes running in and (righthander Chris) Leroux and Albers said, ‘Oh no, we’ve got to congratulate him like it’s an actual home run.’ So half the team went over to congratulate him and the other half doesn’t do it so he’s standing in the dugout asking, ‘Why are you guys going to big league me?’ Leroux turns to him and he said, ‘You realize he caught the ball, right?’ He had no idea. It was absolutely over his head.”

Said Leroux: “It happened and I thought I was the only one who saw it. I was looking around and thinking, he caught the ball right? O’Neill was running around the bases like he just hit a 600-foot homer and fist-bumped Ducey at third, and then he came in the dugout and people started giving him high fives and stuff. I looked at him and I said, ‘You know that didn’t go out right?’ And he looked at me like I was joking and I said, ‘I’m not joking man, he caught the ball like 40 feet from the wall,’ and everybody started cracking up.”

Outfielder Rene Tosoni will take credit for getting the dugout into the mock celebration from the top step, waiting in the hole for his at-bat, while Albers, “was trying to get everybody on board that it had gone out to see how long we could go with it.” First baseman Jordan Lennerton had the best view, digging into the lefthanded batter’s box as O’Neill found his way to home plate and high-fived him right in the chest, leaving Lennerton “slightly dumbfounded.”

“It’s funny because none of the umpires spoke English, so they didn’t tell me to stop,” O’Neill said. “The guy I guess got it at the warning track, and he acted like he didn’t catch it, from what I saw at least. So I’m thinking it went over, and there were no fans there, so I don’t have any notification of what happened. I just kept running around the bases and I ended up touching home plate and all the boys gave me heck for it when I got back to the dugout.”

Added Albers: “If it’s anybody but Tyler O’Neill it probably doesn’t work.”

That tournament followed a very successful Pan Am tournament for the slugger, and preceded his huge season with Double-A Jackson, where for much of the year O’Neill was leading the loop in the Triple Crown categories, was named a Southern League All-Star, and represented his country at the Futures Game in San Diego before winning the Southern League championship with the Generals.

“It feels good to win again,” the native of Maple Ridge, British Columbia said. “Later in my high school years and early in my professional career, there wasn’t a lot of winning. It was about individual statistics. But the Pan American Games turned things around for me a little bit, gave me an objective.

“We were playing as a unit with the boys, and it was the same with the Jackson Generals down in the Southern League this year. We really molded and came together, and that’s what it takes to have a winning club. It doesn’t matter how much individual talent you have, it’s all about the team effort and everyone has to pull their own weight.”

O’Neill certainly pulled his weight in Jackson, slashing .293/.374/.508 in 130 games with his 24 homers to go along with 26 doubles, four triples, a league-leading 102 RBIs and 12 stolen bases.

“If you fully invest in your team and you fully believe in each other, the individual stats go hand in hand with team success,” he said. “So that’s what we did in Pan Ams here in Ajax and that’s what we did in the Southern League this year.”

Always working to improve, and cutting his strikeout percentage—from 31 percent in 2015 to 26 percent in 2016—O’Neill believes he is developing his approach and hitting philosophy, getting better as he goes.

“Obviously the strikeouts are going to be high for me,” he said. “That’s the way it is, because I’m not necessarily an all-or-nothing guy but I go for it. I go for it, so I’m going to strike out here and there, but in the end I’m going to learn that if I’ve got an 0-1 count and I get a fastball middle-away, just go that way. Don’t wait for a hanger, or don’t wait for a middle-in pitch, and I think I did that very well this year. That all comes with maturity and experience and I’m just going to keep doing that, gain more experience, and just become better.”

Looking forward to starting the season with Triple-A Tacoma after manning the outfield for Team Canada at the World Baseball Classic in March, O’Neill is excited about where his next steps will lead and is hoping to get his game to the highest level this year.

“Oh, I think about it every day,” O’Neill said. “It motivates me, and that’s why we play this game, it’s to get to the big leagues, so that’s what I think about every day. If I wanted to, I could drive 20 minutes up the I-5 and I could look at Safeco Field, it’s literally right in front of me. It’s right there. So I’m very excited about this season, I’m very excited about the WBC in the spring, and I’m really going to make a mark in Tacoma. I feel good and I’m going to let my performance dictate how fast I move up.”