TAMPA — It can happen this quickly: One second you are perfectly healthy, a professional athlete in the very prime of your career, your only concern wondering if you can avoid the kind of sluggish start to a season that has been one of the routines of your career, an unwelcome calling card.
The next second, you hear a pop …
It sounds so innocent, so inconsequential. Pop! You are in a ballpark in Glendale, Ariz., that also seems like a place where no harm can visit you — Camelback Ranch sounds like a place where middle-aged men go to find their mojo, not where 32-year-old baseball players go to lose a precious season of their career. You are wearing the vestments of the United States of America.
You swing at a ball lying stationary on a tee.
Pop!
“When you’re an athlete,” Teixeira said Sunday morning, “you learn to be in tuned with your body and to trust it.”
The smile that follows tells you that he has had some deeply personal conversations with himself the last 363 days in which his body channeled Otter from “Animal House.” “You screwed up. You trusted us.”
Teixeira shook his head.
“I’ll say this: As a baseball player, you play every day, so many games, so many years, and you think you know how much you love the game. But then it’s taken away from you. And that’s when you realize just how crazy you are for it. How much you really do love it.”
Wednesday will be the one-year anniversary of the pop that changed everything for Teixeira, when his right wrist betrayed him as he was prepping for a World Baseball Classic exhibition game against the White Sox, a pop that would limit his season to 15 games and 63 at-bats and a .151/.270/.340 slash line (in a career where it’s .278/.368/.525) that illustrated how profoundly the pop affected him even when he tried to salvage something out of 2013.
There were plenty of grumbles, on and off the record, from inside the Yankees and outside, among Yankees fans, that such a devastating injury would happen outside the pinstriped purview. Derek Jeter’s ankle injury was just as ruinous, to the player and the 2013 season, as Teixeira’s, but there was an odd nobility to how and when he went down, inside Yankee Stadium, trying to make a play in a postseason game.
It’s not unlike the sick, sinking feeling many Islanders (team folk and fans both) felt two weeks ago when John Tavares suffered a season-ending knee injury not in pursuit of a miracle playoff at Nassau Coliseum but while competing for Team Canada at the Winter Olympics in Sochi.
Still, much like Tavares insisted the injury wouldn’t make him regret his decision to play for Team Canada this year, or make him think twice about doing so in the future — “There’s always concern in this game, always a risk when you step on the ice of possible injuries,” Tavares said — of all the things that have given Teixeira pause this past year, playing in the WBC isn’t one of them.
“Honestly, I believe that if it was going to happen, it would’ve happened in Tampa, too, if I’d been with the Yankees,” Teixera said. “It’s just a fact of life when you do this for a living. Sometimes guys get hurt.”
He has remained more upbeat than most people would when forced to surrender a year of a career. He had some dark moments last year; for an athlete used to playing every day, there are few things more humbling than watching teammates prepare to play with a cast on your hand.
“You feel useless,” he said. “Totally useless.”
So he has tried to keep to his schedule, be faithful to his routine. He didn’t hit Sunday, which raised some eyebrows, but he said that was a regularly assigned day out of the cage so he doesn’t overextend himself. Joe Girardi said he’s likely to play either Thursday or Friday, which may well keep Teixeira on pace to be in the lineup Opening Day in Houston.
“When guys are out for a while, they miss the game so much that sometimes they rush themselves,” Girardi said. “But he’s right on track.”
Two days shy of a year after the small pop changed everything, Teixeira understands his manager’s viewpoint.
“I did miss it, incredibly so,” he said. “But I also know I appreciate it more than I ever did before. And maybe sacrificing one year will add a year or two to the back end of my career. It’s how you have to look at it.”