Teixeira's Contract Is Not That Big a Deal in New York

TAMPA -- In any of the 29 other Major League Baseball spring training camps, the arrival of a graceful, powerful switch-hitting first baseman who signed an eight-year, $180 million contract in the offseason would mean his every movement, his every word, his every swing would be monitored. Mark Teixeira arrived. Mark Teixeira spoke. Mark Teixeira hit. Mark Teixeira showered.

Last week, when the New York Yankees conducted their first full-squad workout, Teixeira stood in the dugout alongside one of the back fields at the club's complex, holding a bat. Photographers crouched in front of him, and the click-click-click was incessant. Yet when Teixeira moved, the photographers held their ground. "Excuse me," he said, and slid past. The pictures continued to be snapped, over and over again, of Alex Rodriguez, who was doing nothing more than sitting on the bench of the same dugout.

So it is with the Yankees, who stole the offseason's most significant offensive prize from their chief rival (Boston), his former team (the Los Angeles Angels) and a pair of wannabes within an easy drive of his childhood home of Severna Park (Washington and Baltimore). When Teixeira arrived here two days before full-squad workouts began, his words were indeed monitored, but most of them were about Rodriguez, with whom he was teammates in Texas in 2003. As Derek Jeter, the Yankees' shortstop and captain said, "It's something every year" at New York's spring training, and this year, it is about Rodriguez's admission that he used performance-enhancing drugs during his three seasons with the Rangers.

That leaves Teixeira all to himself. As reporters monitored Rodriguez's every breath -- he played his first game of catch with Jeter Wednesday morning, stepped into the cage for the first time at 12:24 p.m., stroked his first batting practice home run on his second swing -- Teixeira came off the field after the workout, headed to his new home clubhouse at Steinbrenner Field and stood at his locker alone even as three dozen media members crowded the room, waiting for someone else.

"I think every other team I would have been on, I'd have had the highest contract in team history and the highest [average annual] salary in team history," Teixeira said. "That would have been maybe a negative distraction."

Here, Teixeira hardly merits characterization as a distraction, and it could be argued that his arrival is no better than the fourth-biggest story of the Yankees' spring, clearly behind the ongoing saga of Rodriguez and perhaps outdistanced by Jeter's reactions to A-Rod's situation and the arrival of pitchers CC Sabathia and A.J. Burnett, who were signed for a combined $243.5 million in an effort to address New York's previously fragile rotation. And Rodriguez's 10-year, $275 million contract -- one that could grow by $30 million more should Rodriguez pass Barry Bonds's all-time record of 762 home runs -- clearly outshines that of Teixeira, who occupies a locker stall on the opposite side of one of the exits to the clubhouse.

Teixeira agreed to his deal Dec. 23, after Sabathia and Burnett had already joined the Yankees, and the deal surprised even those who now share the clubhouse with him.

"I still kind of thought we might have been in the Manny [Ramírez] sweepstakes at the time," outfielder Johnny Damon said. "You hear the rumblings: 'Oh, he wants to be close to home, and Boston's making a run, and the Angels.' And then when we signed him, I was like, 'You have got to be kidding me.' "

Which pretty much characterizes the reaction throughout baseball. For the Yankees, though, this was the normal course of good business as they head into a new stadium with every conceivable bell and whistle. Teixeira, 28, is well aware of the accomplishments -- and accompanying contracts -- of those around him, and it is one reason why he says he is at ease with his new team.

"One of the reasons I joined the Yankees is because the team, the pinstripes, are bigger than any one player," he said. "There's a lot of places that I would have signed that I would've had the albatross contract, the contract that didn't allow the team to go after other players. That's not the case here. Far from it."

Teixeira does significantly improve the Yankees, both offensively and defensively. "He's a Gold Glove-caliber player," Damon said, and that does not describe many of New York's recent first basemen, notably the now-departed Jason Giambi. And second-year manager Joe Girardi now has the enviable problem of who to bat third and who to hit cleanup. Teixeira and then Rodriguez (and Girardi said he is leaning this way)? Or Rodriguez and then Teixeira? Other managers can only dream of such angst. The switch-hitting Teixeira has a career slugging percentage of .541 against both right-handers and left-handers, and he instantly balances a left-handed- heavy New York lineup.

"It seems the Yankees have been a club that everyone wants to throw their lefties against," Girardi said. "He's a professional hitter. He knows how to drive in runs. He knows how to run the bases. He knows how to hit for average, take his walks. He's a tough at-bat. You'll watch him grind things out. I mean, he's just a professional hitter."

He is, in fact, precisely the kind of hitter who would have fundamentally changed the lineup of the 102-loss Nationals. Around baseball, the notion that Washington was a serious player for Teixeira's services is still met with a skeptical eye. But Teixeira reiterated, as the pinstriped jerseys hung in the locker behind him, that there were several attractive aspects to the Nationals. He referred to principal owner Ted Lerner, the rarely heard from patriarch of the family that owns the team, as "impressive. A self-made man like that is the great American story."

And he said the club's sales pitch to him was much the same as it is to its fan base.

"They're definitely putting a lot of time and effort into building their farm system, and they have a brand-new stadium with an ownership that wants to win," Teixeira said. "That's a great combination."

Seems that even if Nationals President Stan Kasten didn't land a first baseman, he gained a spokesman. Here, though, with Rodriguez's locker a few paces away and Jeter several stalls down the same wall, the man who would be the centerpiece of any other clubhouse is simply just another piece.

"The spotlight's great," Teixeira said. "But I think on the field is where the spotlight should be. I'd hate for somebody to talk about me only because of my contract. I would rather go out there and do my job and win a world championship and have people talk about me and the team because of that."