Mark Teixeira hit from the right side, then the left, and back and forth twice more, taking turns among his teammates in pregame batting practice Tuesday afternoon at Yankee Stadium. He looked slightly more comfortable from the right side but didn’t make great contact overall. During his breaks, he stood behind the cage and fiddled with his right hand and fingers, seemingly testing himself for discomfort.
At 5:20, the Yankees’ injury-riddled first baseman and manager Joe Girardi led the team’s charge off the field into the Yankees’ dugout. Teixeira, out of character, ignored reporters’ queries about how he felt.
The 34-year-old nevertheless started against the A’s once the rain stopped, Teixeira’s first appearance since missing two games (and leaving Saturday’s contest early) to absorb a cortisone shot into his right wrist. Yet as much as the Yankees keep saying the Teixeira drama will go away, we don’t know that until it actually does disappear. And with Teixeira’s increasing age has come increasing injury drama.
“We’ve been reassured by his doctor a couple of times,” Girardi said before the Yankees took batting practice. “It’s some inflammation, you knock it out and he’ll be fine. There’s nothing to lead me to believe that you can’t knock it out and he can’t be a player who’s 100 percent again.
“Until he actually gets out there, we’re not going to know.”
Teixeira used to be a team’s certainty. First with the Rangers, then with the Braves, briefly with the Angels and finally in his early Yankees years, he proved as durable as virtually anyone in the game. For the first nine years of his career, 2003 through 2011, he averaged 153 games per season.
You can sense some tension on both sides. Teixeira, in St. Louis last week, lamented he played nearly every day — he started in 30-of-31 games — once he came off the disabled list. Resting more often, he said, was “probably the smart thing to do, but we never do that. So we play until it hurts. That’s kind of the way I’ve played since I was a rookie. Kind of the way it is.”
Yankees officials, meanwhile, have continually asserted their confidence Teixeira will be just fine, even as such statements seem to contradict the sports conventional wisdom that you treat the patient more than you treat the symptoms.
It’s hard to completely avoid acrimony during long relationships; shoot, even Derek Jeter got into it with his Yankees bosses a few years back. But if Teixeira doesn’t get any healthier with age, you wonder how many more of these uncomfortable episodes we’ll experience between now and the end of his eight-year, $180 million contract in 2016.
The tension has ratcheted up currently because of the Yankees’ dire need for power, as they’re missing Teixeira and Carlos Beltran (right elbow), and free agent Kendrys Morales is ready to sign with a team once the amateur draft starts on Thursday (which will eliminate the requirement that a team sacrifice a draft pick to get him).
The Yankees have held some internal discussions about Morales, yet they don’t love his game and also wonder whether he’d actually want to sign with them given the lack of guaranteed at-bats. Other teams — possibly Seattle, Milwaukee or Texas — could provide him with a less cloudy road map back to free agency this winter.
The Yankees would greatly prefer clarity with their own guy than pouring money into another entity. They won’t know for a while whether that wish will be granted. All they know, for a while, is Teixeira ranks as both a major asset and a major question mark.