HOUSTON — Mark Teixeira was anxious to get 2014 started before Tuesday night’s opener against the Astros at Minute Maid Park, his first game since coming back from right wrist surgery last July.
“I’m curious, just like everyone else,” Teixeira said before the 6-2 loss to the Astros. “I don’t know how my body is gonna hold up. I understand the reality of it.”
And he knows regardless of what he says about how his swing is improving, it won’t matter until he sees it on the field — especially after an uninspiring spring.
“Talk is cheap,” Teixeira said. “I know I have to prove I’m the same player I was before.”
Unlike most of his teammates, he showed some positive signs Tuesday, hitting a fly ball to the track in right in the second, drawing a walk in the fourth and delivering a single in the seventh. He finished by beating the shift with a run-scoring single to left in the eighth.
Hardly the production the Yankees are looking for from the first baseman, to whom they still owe $67.5 million over the next three seasons, but not awful, either.
“I felt pretty good,” Teixeira said.
Even Teixeira admits he doesn’t know how his surgically repaired wrist will respond to the rigors of the season or whether it will allow him to be the player he has been in the past.
“I have no idea,” Teixeira said. “I’m pleased with the progress I made this spring, but until you do it, I can’t just assume it’s going to happen.”
Teixeira found that out when he injured himself preparing for the WBC last year.
“I feel ready to start the season, but there’s no guarantee of what’s gonna happen today or tomorrow,” Teixeira said. “All it takes is one swing — one preseason swing — and everything changes.”
And while plenty of attention is paid to how Derek Jeter and his ankle hold up and how the big-money free agents like Jacoby Ellsbury, Brian McCann and Carlos Beltran adjust to their new surroundings, the Yankees’ fate is equally tied to Teixeira.
“A year off is a long time,” general manager Brian Cashman said of Teixeira’s rocky spring, when the first baseman said he didn’t trust that his wrist was healthy when he swung. “It’s knocking a lot of rust out. I know he feels much better [Tuesday] than he did maybe 10 days or a week ago.”
Manager Joe Girardi said he saw Teixeira swing with more authority in the final days of spring training.
A notoriously slow starter, it likely won’t be known how Teixeira has healed until later in the season. But he admitted again that his wrist will never be “normal.”
“Is that hitting the ball into the second row instead of the fifth?” Teixeira said. “I hope it is.”
The Yankees will take that.