New York Yankees Mark Teixeira: A Workingman’s Ballplayer Takes His Final Cuts
Mark Teixeira will take the field for the final time on Sunday afternoon against the Baltimore Orioles at Yankee Stadium. There will be no huge send-off. His number will not be retired. And there’s no plaque going up in Monument Park. Instead, after the game, Teixeira will carry his lunch pail out the door and go home to his family.
Besides the position he played, Mark Teixeira has always reminded me of Don Mattingly in the way he carried himself both on and off the field. Never the focus of attention, like Mattingly, he just simply showed up every day for work (when he was healthy), put on his uniform and went out and quietly did the job he was being paid to do. No fuss, no muss.
Mark Teixeira is playing his fourteenth and final season in the majors. Following stints with the Texas Rangers and blink of an eye appearances with the Braves and Angels, he is completing his eighth season with the New York Yankees. Teixeira (along with CC Sabathia) was brought in by the Yankees for one reason and one reason only. That was to win one more for “The Gipper” George Steinbrenner whose health was beginning to fail.
Teixeira came through for the Yankees that year (2009) helping to lead them to another World Series championship. He hit 39 home runs that season and drove in 122 while batting .292. He was also injury-free that year and appeared in all but six of the Yankees’ regular season games.
If he was alive today, it’s likely that Steinbrenner would have labeled Mark Teixeira as one of his “warriors”, the nickname he came up with for Paul O’Neill. Because over the years, Teixeira has played hurt more often than not. This little thing and that little thing and it’s added up over the years to as much as 1,000 at bats and quite possibly a legitimate shot at 500 career home runs (he has 408).
But more than the numbers, it’s really more about the character of the man himself. Mark Teixeira is his own man and he proved that again this year by voluntarily announcing his retirement. Better than anyone, he knew that he was but a shell of himself on the field. He didn’t need anyone to show him the door.
Instead, Teixeira found his own way to the door himself, and more importantly the one that leads back to his family and especially the touch football games in the backyard with his kids. And most of all, he goes home with his body mostly intact.
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Mark Teixeira was a ballplayer’s player. Never the elite one-percent, he found a home in the middle class of baseball, showed up for work every chance he got, put some decent numbers on the board, and gets to enjoy the cheers he will hear one last time Sunday afternoon at Yankee Stadium. How neat is that?