It was a response through lumber.
Last night Mark Teixeira was drilled twice — on consecutive pitches — by the Rangers’ Vicente Padilla, plunkings that certainly seemed to be intentional. But while Teixeira was livid after the second one and ripped Padilla after the game, he didn’t charge the mound.
“We did the talking with our bats,” he said.
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And the Yankees also continued to do their winning with regularity. They crushed the Rangers in The Bronx, rolling to a 12-3 romp that gave the surging Yanks the AL’s best record at 31-21. That’s a 96-win pace.
The Yankees did the damage with a seven-run fourth inning that turned a 3-2 deficit into a 9-3 lead and was capped by Hideki Matsui’s three-run homer.
Teixeira, though, was a big part of it, too. After he was hit for the second time, he broke up a double play with a hard slide into second — an aggressive play that kept the inning alive as the Yanks scored on the play and five more times to blow the game open.
“It was a good coincidence,” Teixeira said of the slide following the plunking,
The Yankees have won 16 of 20, and their explosive offense has already scored in double figures eight times in 52 games — compared to 12 times all of last year. And just in case you think this season’s outbursts are a product of the cozy new stadium, five of the eight outbursts have been on the road.
Either way, Teixeira wasn’t happy last night with Padilla — his Rangers teammate in 2006-07.
“That is not the right way to play the game,” Teixeira said of Padilla, who led the AL in 2006 with 17 hit-by-pitches. “That guy has been doing that his entire career.”
Hard to argue. Teixeira homered off Padilla the first two times he faced him in his career — in 2005 when Padilla was with the Phillies and Teixeira with the Rangers. In his next at-bat against Padilla that game, Teixeira was hit. The two then faced each other seven times last year, with Teixeira going 0-for-5 with a walk and a sac fly. And in Teixeira’s first turn up last night, he grounded out.
But in the second inning, Teixeira was plunked on his shoulder to load the bases, and it seemed deliberate — that Padilla preferred to face Alex Rodriguez. Then in the fourth, Padilla again hit Teixeira, this time on his rear end, to again load the bases.
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Padilla denied hitting Teixeira intentionally, though his catcher, Jarrod Saltalamacchia, hardly backed him.
“I had runners on first and third. Why would I do that?” Padilla said of hitting Teixeira in the fourth. “That is stupid if he thinks that was an intentional pitch.”
Said Saltalamacchia, “I can’t speak for Padilla. I don’t know what he did. I don’t know if intentional or not. It’s baseball; it’s the way it goes unfortunately. I had nothing to do with it. I don’t know what he was doing. If he did it on purpose, Teixeira had every right to be mad. I don’t blame him. But I don’t know. All I know is that Padilla likes to pitch in. That’s what we called for, a fastball in.”
Teixeira fired his bat to the ground, and could be seen to say, “That’s [freaking] [bleep]” (you can figure it out).
A-Rod followed with a tailor-made double-play ball. But after the Rangers got the force at second, Teixeira took out shortstop Elvis Andrus — legitimately — and Rodriguez was safe as the go-ahead run scored.
“I’m not going to retaliate,” said Teixeira. “Breaking up two, that’s what you’re taught at a young age.”
But Posada said of Teixeira’s emotion, “I think the slide at second base tells it all.”