NEW YORK - The tabloid press is the conscience of the New York sports fan. So when one of them yesterday ran the headline "Earn Your Stripes" on its back page beside Yankees first baseman Mark Teixeira's mug, the message was unmistakable.
Almost as if to pick up on that message, as the Philadelphia Phillies took batting practice Wednesday night before New York's 7-3 win Game 6 win to clinch the World Series, the Yankee Stadium videoboard ran a feature on the fact that Teixeira and Johnny Damon hit back-to-back home runs six times this season.
The Phillies and Yankees brought the World Series back to the Bronx without much in the way of production from their two slugging first basemen, Ryan Howard of the Phillies and Teixeira, who joined the Yankees last winter on a 10-year, $180-million contract.
This is hardly a harbinger, of course; in his first World Series with the Yankees, in 1996, Tino Martinez was 1-for-11 with five strikeouts and he went on to become one of the most beloved members of the Yankees of the late '90s while developing a reputation as a clutch hitter. Teixeira has been consistent; he, Albert Pujols and Jimmie Foxx are the only first basemen to surpass 309 home runs and 100 runs batted in six consecutive years before the age of 29.
Teixeira's had postseason power outages before. He hit .467 (7-for-15) for the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim in last year's American League Division Series against the Boston Red Sox. But they were all singles and he had just one run batted in.
"Ryan and I are very similar players," Teixeira said. "When we get on hot streaks, it's tough to get us out and we can carry a team. But when you're a power hitter and you try to hit home runs, when you try to drive in a lot of runs, you also strike out. That's the way it is.
"If you want Ryan Howard to hit .300 and hit 15 homers a year, he's not going to go into slumps. But this guy puts up bigger numbers than anyone in baseball the last five years. So it's going to happen every now and then."
After hitting a combined .180 with two HRs, 8 RBIs and 17 strikeouts in the Yankees' 15 postseason games (including a 3-for-22, 1-HR, 8-K performance in the World Series), Teixeira believes the way in which baseball has stretched out its postseason schedule makes it harder for batters to get out of a slump. It's not just a lack of rhythm, he said. Because of the down time, there's a tendency to watch more videotape and take batting practice. And he is a creature of habit more than most of the Yankees. Derek Jeter calls him "The Robot'' because he adheres to such a rigid routine, including gobbling down a peanut butter and jelly sandwich almost immediately upon his arrival at the park.
"When you play a game here, a day off, play a game, two days off, four days off, sometimes the approach doesn't work," Teixeira said. "Maybe during the season, when you're a little tired, you just kind of go out and play the game because you've played 20 games in a row and your natural abilities take over. But you can't do anything about it. The playoffs are always going to be that way."
Yes, they are.
More to the point, Teixeira better adapt because there's a chance he'll be back here a couple of more times before his contract expires, and there is no doubt that maintaining form this late in an already long season is an art form. Lefty Cole Hamels of the Phillies is a cautionary tale. Overworked after last year's World Series, he says that his off-season regimen was all out of whack. He was never able to regain his footing, really, all through the regular season.
Wednesday night's game matched the latest date ever for a World Series. Game 7 of the 2001 World Series between the Yankees and Arizona Diamondbacks ended on Nov. 4, after a regular season that was interrupted by the 9/11 terrorist attacks. That loss -- with Mariano Rivera on the mound -- effectively ended the Yankees' dynasty. If there is a new dynasty in the offing, Teixeira will be front and center. As Yankees general manager Brian Cashman said last week when discussing his big three free agent acquisitions (Teixeira, C.C. Sabathia, A.J. Burnett), signing somebody to play for the Yankees is a matter of education more than recruiting.
"If you make that kind of financial commitment, you don't want to have a guy show up here after two months and be like, 'Man, this is not what I thought,' because now you're stuck," Cashman said.
This is how it is, and based on the way the Yankees do business, it's going to be a regular part of Teixeira's life. He better be going to school on November baseball.
(Contact Jeff Blair at jblair(at)globeandmail.com)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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