Teixeira fighting illness and a slow start

Still digging around in his figurative first-aid kit for something to heal Mark Teixeira's sallow offensive numbers, Yankees manager Joe Girardi Monday night tried the strong medicine of dropping the two-time All-Star to the lower third of the batting order.

If hitting seventh somehow can accelerate Teixeira's baseball metabolism, even as he continues to battle a seasonlong case of bronchitis, then both men were willing to give it a try.

"It's really not a big deal to me," Teixeira said, "because we all know I'm not 100 percent. And, you know, at the end of the day, we have to win games, and if switching up the lineup helps, then, great. Because we've got to start winning."

Prognosis: negative. The Yankees (21-21) lost to the Kansas City Royals and Teixeira went 1-for-4, including a ninth-inning double when the game was all but over, and two strikeouts.

Girardi said he told Teixeira, "My goal is to get you back to where you belong" -- which is somewhere far north of Teixeira's .227 batting average, 53 points below his career .280. Not that feeling better about his hitting necessarily will be the nostrum for robust physical fitness.

"I feel a little better" was as far as Teixeira would go after mostly resting (one pinch-hit appearance) through the Yankees' three-game weekend series against Cincinnati. "It really makes you appreciate it when you're healthy," he said. "I'd love to be able to say that I'm 100 percent and strong. But I haven't been driving the ball like I should be this year. It's just been a rough go. So it really doesn't matter where I hit.

"I'm not going to make excuses. It just hasn't been fun, hasn't been a fun ride. It's just been a little exhausting."

Were Teixeira not a 32-year-old veteran of proven skills, a four-time Gold Glove winner who averaged 113 RBIs through his first nine seasons, Girardi might have made the lineup move earlier. "You probably give them a little bit more rope when they are a veteran players, because they have a track record," Girardi said.

Teixeira appeared to acknowledge that what had delivered him through difficult situations in the past -- "I've always been someone that's played through injuries . . . If my manager needs me, if my teammates need me, I play through it and hope for the best." -- likely has delayed his recovery.

"I've talked to every doctor out there," he said. "Most of them say the same thing: Rest would've helped right from the beginning. That didn't happen, and that's why stuff like this kind of hangs around."

He is not fretting over his statistics, "because, every year, they're there. At the end of the year, I'll put my stats up against any power hitter in baseball."

Furthermore, hitting seventh, "I'm still Mark Teixeira, still put up some pretty good numbers in my career, so I don't think they're going to start underhanding it to me. I wish they would. But I don't think it's going to happen."

That would really be sick.