A UNIQUE BOND

Baseball lifer Gallego has the distinction as second-to-last Yankee to wear the number 2

It has been a great baseball life for Mike Gallego, who played in three World Series and four postseasons overall, picking up a ring with Sandy Alderson’s 1989 A’s, and coached in another Fall Classic for the 2007 Rockies.

In Yankees lore, however, Gallego serves primarily as the answer to a trivia question:

Who was the next-to-last player to wear No. 2?

“I knew I wasn’t worthy of a single digit,” Gallego, now the Angels’ director of baseball development, said this past week in a phone interview. “I respected the history of the Yankees too much. I would’ve been fine with 82.”

No. 2 officially will be retired Sunday night in honor of Derek Jeter, the Yankees’ iconic captain who received the number for his major league debut on May 2, 1995, and wore it for the duration of his career. Buck Showalter, then the Yankees’ manager and now the Orioles’ skipper, has offered a couple of different origin stories over the years regarding how Jeter got No. 2. Showalter told Ian O’Connor for his 2011 book on Jeter, “The Captain,” that he went straight to owner George Steinbrenner on the matter. He told The New York Times in 2014 he consulted with clubhouse manager Nick Priore and general manager Gene Michael before Michael signed off on it.

Priore, the person who would remember best, declined a request for an interview. Yet the history of the number shows that, though the team broke precedent in giving No. 2 to a rookie, it isn’t as if the Yankees reserved the designation for future Hall of Famers.

Gallego, a respected veteran who signed a three-year contract with the Yankees in January 1992, wore No. 9 with the A’s, and he couldn’t wear that with the Yankees because they had retired it in honor of Roger Maris. So he got 2 and wore it through 1994, after which he returned to the A’s. Before Gallego, veteran infielder Wayne Tolleson — a ver- satile, experienced infielder like Gallego — received 2 when he joined the team in 1986 and had it until the Yankees released him after the 1990 campaign. In 1985 and earlier in ’86, infielder Dale Berra, Yogi’s son, wore it.

“If you look at all those players, we’re all kind of similar utility players,” Gallego said. “I don’t know. Maybe it was the smallest jersey they had available.”

Jeter initially had expressed an interest in taking No. 13, Jim Leyritz’s number, because he wore that in high school to salute his father Charles’ playing career at Fisk University. When he reported to Yankees camp in the spring of 1996, he was surprised to see a double-digit number — 17, according to Jeter’s recent interviews with the YES Network and Yankees Magazine, or 19, according to O’Connor’s book — and successfully lobbied to get No. 2 back.

Gallego kept No. 2 with the 1995 A’s, and he got to know Jeter as a Rockies coach during their occasional interleague meeting, when Gallego had No. 2 — until rookie Troy Tulowitzki asked for it in 2007 because of his respect for Jeter.

“Every time he looked at me, he would point at his back,” Gallego said of Jeter.

Gallego forever will share that bond with Jeter. And he forever will be second-to-last for No. 2 in the Yankees’ universe.

“I’m glad they gave it to the young kid as soon as I got out of his way,” Gallego said,

laughing.