Teixeira chase was Mark madness
NEW YORK – The last time the country introduced a new president while worrying about an economic depression, the New York Yankees slashed the salaries of their biggest stars.
"I don't mind telling you and the world the offer is $50,000, a cut of 25 grand," Babe Ruth said back in 1933, "and that's some wallop."
Ruth eventually signed for $52,000, while Lou Gehrig took a $2,000 pay cut, from $25,000 to $23,000.
Times being what they are today, one can understand why Mark Teixeira, introduced Tuesday as the newest member of the Yankees, said that his No. 1 reaction was "relief" when he learned that the Yankees, after already investing about $243 million in pitchers CC Sabathia and A.J. Burnett, somehow had scraped together $180 million for him to provide for his family the next eight years.
What Teixeira failed to mention while expressing his gratitude to the Yankees was that the Boston Red Sox had constructed an offer with vesting option years in what would have been a 10-year package for even more money, and that agent Scott Boras had pitched a similar proposal to the Los Angeles Angels late in the process that would have kept him with the team he helped to the playoffs last season.
Make no mistake, family is important to Teixeira. His father, John, a former Navy pilot, and his mother, Margy, a teacher and breast cancer survivor, stood off to the side at the news conference while their son, in perfectly pressed suit, expertly knotted tie and gleaming teeth, sat with his right hand clasped between those of his wife, Leigh, as the Yankees proudly showed off their newest bauble. It was one final bit of business before the team moves into its new billion-dollar palace across the street, though the old Yankee Stadium made its presence heard Tuesday, when general manager Brian Cashman spoke into a microphone that suddenly shrieked in a burst of electronic feedback.
"There are some bugs left in the old stadium," Cashman said after recovering. "I do promise Mark will be delivering bangs and blasts along the way like that one."
Leigh Teixeira, dark-haired and petite, was the one whose opinion carried the day, her husband said, when he finally made the decision to sign with the Yankees. While having dinner together in Texas a couple of weeks before signing, he said she told him that all things being equal, she hoped he would end up in pinstripes.
It's the kind of story that is told on such an occasion, to go along with the one about Teixeira's recollection of his favorite player being another Yankee first baseman, Don Mattingly, which is why the Maryland native would wear a Yankee cap when the Bombers came to town to play his beloved Orioles. Mattingly's No. 23, which Teixeira once wore in homage, has been retired by the Yankees, so the jersey Teixeira buttoned on Tuesday had No. 25 on its back, the number worn by another slugging first baseman, Jason Giambi, who came to the Yankees as a free agent with similar fanfare in 2002 and didn't come close to delivering on his gilded expectations.
"When I met with him in Washington," Cashman said of his first meeting with Teixeira, early in December, one in which he presented the player with a video of the new stadium with a soundtrack that included tunes by Twisted Sister, a Teixeira favorite, "I felt he wanted to be a Yankee. He didn't say that, but I just got a feeling, you know what, if all things being equal, this is where he wants to be."
But for all the warm and fuzzy tales Tuesday, according to the parties involved Teixeira told the Boston Red Sox when they came to visit him in Texas on Dec. 18 – majority owner John W. Henry, CEO Larry Lucchino and GM Theo Epstein – that he was prepared to sign with them that night if they met his conditions.
It is commonly understood that Boston made an offer of eight years for about $170 million. What is not widely known is that the Red Sox also had on the table two vesting option years which would have realized Boras' goal to land a 10-year deal for his client.
The total value of the package would have been worth in the neighborhood of $212 million, if the option years vested.
But Teixeira and Boras rejected that offer; the Red Sox, in their view, had made the conditions that would trigger the option years too steep. Teixeira would have had to maintain the standards of an elite player, not just achieve certain numbers of games played or plate appearances.
So the player and agent took another tack: raise the annual average value of your eight-year proposal, they told Boston, to a point above the $23 million per year of the deal signed by Sabathia, and Teixeira would be going to a news conference in Fenway Park. Or the Red Sox could have guaranteed another year, matching the nine-year proposal Teixeira's camp said he had already gotten from the Washington Nationals (an offer that the Nationals to this day have not confirmed).
Teixeira thought the Red Sox were at least prepared to mull it over. Instead, they balked, Henry sending out an email to the media that the Red Sox would not be a factor. The Henry protest was construed as a bluff, and it was. Boston kept talking to Boras, though in the end, they did not make substantive changes to their offer.
It's also true that the Angels – and there are people close to Teixeira who swear that his first choice was to go back to Anaheim – were also told explicitly what it would take to get Teixeira to sign off on a deal. The Angels were told, after the Boston meeting, that another team had offered option years. The Angels appeared interested – the Boras camp spoke with Angels officials during the team's annual Christmas party, and Teixeira indicated a desire to meet again with Angels owner Arte Moreno.
But the next morning, Boras received a message from Moreno that the Angels, who had offered Teixeira eight years at $160 million, were pulling out.
"It's a dirty process," Moreno told Boras, according to multiple sources. "No player is worth more than $160 million."
The Teixeira camp was confounded and dismayed that Moreno was unwilling to engage in the give-and-take typical of negotiations. Teixeira, they believed, could have vaulted the Angels back into the World Series; the Angels had turned their backs, they thought, on a franchise-changing player.
"I don't know," Boras said Tuesday when asked why the Angels withdrew. "I'm not sure. I was traveling, and when I got home I received a message from Arte. I don't know the reasons behind it."
Teixeira had said he wanted to make a decision before Christmas. Boras set a deadline of 1 p.m. on Dec. 23. One day earlier, at Teixeira's instruction, the agent picked up the phone and called Cashman. The Yankees had made a preliminary offer to Teixeira early in the process, had pulled it off the table, and went about signing Sabathia and Burnett.
Now here was Boras on the phone, telling Cashman, with whom he'd stayed in regular contact, that Teixeira wanted to be a Yankee. The call was reminiscent of one he'd made on behalf of another client, outfielder Carlos Beltran, a few years earlier; Cashman had resisted that siren song, and Beltran signed with the Mets instead. This time, the Yankees responded.
"Two hours before he made his decision," Cashman said, "I remember telling my people I thought he was going to Boston, and I did not think he was going to us.
"But an hour before, I said, 'Wow, we may have a shot.' Scott was focusing on more minute details of the contract."
The Yankees got their man. The Red Sox, their relationship with Boras already strained by contentious dealings over Johnny Damon, Daisuke Matsuzaka and Manny Ramirez, were left to wonder why they were not given a last chance to counter the Yankees' offer. They apparently hadn't counted on Leigh Teixeira carrying the day. Either that, or the process was rigged in the Yankees' favor from the get-go, a conspiracy theory that has legs with some members of the Red Sox hierarchy.
"There was no mention of the Yankees, but we felt all along that they were going to get the last call," Henry wrote Tuesday night in an email to the Associated Press. "That's what you deal with in working with Scott."
Said Boras: "I'm only going to say this. Mark did not take his best financial offer, in dollars and years."
The Yankees are unapologetic.
Hal Steinbrenner, the son chosen to carry on the family tradition, said he did not intend to deviate from the path set by his father.
"If some of the owners are upset that we're trying to invest in our team, which we do for the fans and only the fans," he said, "then I'm not going to lose any sleep over it."
