Former Yankee Mark Teixeira says baseball prepared him for career in politics

TAMPA, Fla. — Mark Teixeira said that early in his campaign, late in the summer of 2025 after announcing his candidacy for U.S. Congress, he couldn’t help but draw a parallel to his first year in the major leagues.

“There were a handful of days, and really just a handful of days, my rookie year that I’m like, ‘This really sucks. I’m not sure if I’m cut out for this,' ” Teixeira told Newsday by phone earlier this week. “There were a handful of days on the campaign the first six months where I said, ‘This really sucks. I’m not sure if I really want to do this.’ ”

Teixeira, speaking from his home office in Austin, Texas, laughed.

And he could afford to do so.

Teixeira, 45, who played 14 seasons in the big leagues, including the last eight of those with the Yankees — he was a cornerstone piece of the franchise’s last World Series champion in 2009 — was just a week removed from winning 60.9% of the vote in the Republican primary for Texas’ 21st Congressional district. In a  12-candidate field, Teixeira easily cleared the threshold of surpassing 50% of the vote to avoid a run-off.

From the time he launched his campaign to take over the seat occupied by Chip Roy, who decided to run for Texas attorney general, Teixeira was the favorite to win the seat in the Republican-leaning district. He is facing Democrat Kristin Hook, 40, a biological scientist who grew up in South Texas.

But nothing was guaranteed for Teixeira, who  was officially entering the world of politics for the first time.

And in an interview covering the transition of a professional athlete to politics — and how that first profession prepared him for that transition — Teixeira was emphatic in the affirmative.

"It’s a huge asset. No. 1, no one’s going to outwork me, no one understands the dedication that it takes to fight through failure, which happens all the time in baseball and in politics,” Teixeira said. “It happens all the time on the campaign. People turn you down all the time, people boo you. People root against you. I’ve used this example during my campaign: I’ve been booed by 40,000 of my home fans in New York. I can deal with people not agreeing with my politics. [Having] that thick skin is very important.”

Teixeira did not make “former Major League Baseball player” a significant part of his campaign. In fact, he said, at times it could be a hindrance.

“I went into this campaign with name ID, with a lot of support from different politicians and funding and all that kind of stuff,” Teixeira said. “But I had to prove myself every single day because most people just looked at me like, ‘Oh, here’s the baseball player. What does he think he’s doing running?’ I had to earn every vote just like I had to earn every at-bat in the big leagues.”

Teixeira, a native of Annapolis (his father served in the Navy), said the idea of entering politics first occurred to him in 2013 after he tore the tendon sheath in his right wrist while swinging a bat the day before that year’s World Baseball Classic (he was a member of Team USA). Teixeira, a five-time All-Star and three-time Gold Glove winner, missed the first two months of that season, came back briefly and was done by late June when surgery was recommended.

“I’m sitting with a cast on my wrist after surgery going, ‘All right, there’s going to be life after baseball, it’s going to be sooner rather than later; what are some things I’m interested in?’ ”  he said. “And politics was something that was on the list. It was not No. 1, but it was definitely on the list.”

No. 1, Teixeira said, was joining a club’s front office or, more preferred, being part of an ownership group. After the 2016 season, Teixeira’s last, those opportunities never presented themselves. He worked as a commentator with ESPN from 2017-20 and moved with his wife, Leigh, and their three children to Austin in 2021

Through his various business ventures, Teixeira met some of the major players in Texas politics. When Roy chose to run for attorney general, a lane opened.

An early call was to Yankees president Randy Levine, a longtime power broker in Republican politics, locally and nationally.

“Very simple. One, he’s always been a leader. When on the field, he was a leader,” Levine said by phone. “Two, he’s very smart; he’s always been very, very smart. And he cares. That’s why I encouraged him to do it and said that I would help him.”

Teixeira announced his run last Aug. 28, the start of a six-month daily campaign slog he compared to “a 162-game grind of a baseball schedule.”

Before embarking on that came what Teixeira called a “crash course” in educating himself with an array of policy briefs.

“I spent pretty much all day, every day, for that month reading,” said Teixeira, who received an endorsement from President Trump. “I’m not one of those guys that thinks that I’m smarter than I am. I know what I don’t know.”

Only a handful of former Major League Baseball players have entered the halls of Congress, the most recent being Jim Bunning, the Hall of Fame pitcher who served in the House from 1987-1999 (and was a Senator from 1999-2011).

“Listen, I haven’t even been elected. The general [election] looks really promising . . . so I feel good about November,” Teixeira said. “But I am taking this one day at a time."

He added: “There’s a phrase in politics that I just learned, and it’s ‘you either run unopposed or run scared.’ I’m going to keep running scared and keep working my tail off and good things will happen in November.”

By Erik Boland

erik.boland@newsday.comeboland11

Erik Boland started in Newsday's sports department in 2002. He covered high school and college sports, then shifted to the Jets beat. He has covered the Yankees since 2009.