Teixeira still won't concede he's slumping

BALTIMORE - At what point does a bad start become a bad year?

Mark Teixeira isn't ready to address that question yet.

After his most recent hitless game, 0-for-4 Sunday in the Yankees' 4-3 victory over the Blue Jays, Teixeira assiduously avoided using the word "slump" and even seemed to dispute that he is in one. "The back of my baseball card says it all," he said, a statement he has made previously this season.

He's right, of course. The notoriously streaky first baseman - whom Joe Girardi has said he's sticking with in the three-hole - brought a career batting average of .290 and a career on-base percentage of .378 into the 2010 season. He averaged 35 homers and 114 RBIs in his first seven seasons and hadn't hit below .281 in the previous six seasons.

But Teixeira begins a three-game series in Baltimore Tuesday night hitting .211 with a .326 on-base percentage, eight homers and 34 RBIs, and he will have to put up some impressive numbers the rest of the season to reach most of his career averages.

He acknowledges, "I've always been hot and cold," though he has a difficult time saying it's been much more of the latter this season.

Teixeira readily says, "I had a great May," but an examination of his statistics shows that 21 of the 25 RBIs and five of the six homers he collected in the month came from May 1-17. He hit .333 (22-for-66) and had a .405 on-base percentage in that span.

He has hit .184 with a .287 OBP since then, a streak reminiscent of April, when he batted .136. So aside from that one hot streak, Teixeira has hit .159.

"You guys can do that all year long," he said of breaking down his numbers that way. "And that's great. It's fun to do because stats are what's fun about this game. But as a player that plays 162 games a year, you don't live and die with every good game and every bad game."

Not all 0-fers are created equal, Teixeira said. He did not get a hit Saturday or Sunday in Toronto, but Teixeira's Sunday was much better than his Saturday, when he went 0-for-6 with five strikeouts. "I swung the bat great today. I felt really good today," he said Sunday.

And though media and fans often don't want to hear "I had good at-bats" after a hitless day, Teixeira was right. He hit the ball hard three times Sunday and looked more comfortable than Saturday, when he said he didn't see the ball well.

"If I had struck out six times today, you probably could have written an article saying, man, there's something wrong with Tex," he said. "But I swung the bat really well. I didn't get any hits, but results, they'll come. Results are going to show up if I keep swinging the bat."

General manager Brian Cashman also is confident that Teixeira will rediscover his stroke. "He's still trying to find himself, and he will," he said. "His track record pretty much shows that. As long as he keeps approaching it the same way, he'll be fine."

Some would like to see him show some frustration after a bad at-bat - break a bat over his knee, blurt out some expletives, slam his helmet back into the dugout rack - but that would be Paul O'Neill, not Mark Teixeira.

"That's always been my personality," he said. "When I hit three home runs, I go about my business. When I strike out, I go about my business. And that's the way you have to play this game. Because if you get too high when you're going well and you get too low when you're not going well, you're going to be done by July. You're not going to be able to play."