Mark Teixeira

Mark Teixeira was the New York Yankees' big offseason answer to a decade of first base questions -- a switch-hitting Gold Glover who signed an 8-year, $180 million deal in December 2008 and delivered a championship in year one. He hit .292 with 39 home runs and 122 RBI in his first Bronx season, made the defining defensive play of the 2009 World Series, and spent the rest of his eight years fighting his own body as hard as he fought opposing pitchers.

The Big Ticket Item

The Yankees didn't just sign Teixeira in that 2008-09 offseason -- they went shopping like a team that had missed the playoffs in 2008 and wanted everyone to know it wouldn't happen again. CC Sabathia and A.J. Burnett got the rotation fixed. Teixeira got first base fixed, a position that had been searching for its next great answer since Don Mattingly and then Tino Martinez moved on.

Eight years, $180 million, no opt-out, full no-trade clause. (Brian Cashman doesn't do half-measures when he decides a hole needs filling.) Teixeira signed on January 6, 2009, and immediately became the guy who was supposed to hit in the middle of a lineup that already had Jeter, A-Rod, and Posada.

He didn't disappoint. Not for a while, anyway.

The Best Season Nobody Talks About Enough

2009 was, statistically, the best year of Teixeira's Yankees life, and it happened to line up with the only ring he ever got. He led the American League in RBI (122) and tied Carlos Pena for the home run title (39), hit .292, and finished second in MVP voting behind Joe Mauer's ridiculous, near-unanimous season. (Jeter finished third. Sometimes the best player in the room still doesn't win the award -- ask anyone who watched 2009 closely.)

The following year, on May 8, 2010, he went deep three times against Boston at Fenway -- only the second Yankee ever to do that in a single game. The first was Lou Gehrig, in 1927. That's the company Teixeira kept when he was right.

Alex Rodriguez got the signature October highlight against Minnesota in the ALDS -- a game-tying two-run shot off Joe Nathan in the ninth -- but Teixeira finished the job. Bottom of the 11th, ALDS Game 2, off Jose Mijares: walk-off solo home run. First Yankees postseason walk-off since Aaron Boone ended the Red Sox's world in 2003. That's not a small thing to have your name attached to.

(He was brutal in the World Series itself -- .136, if you're keeping score, and he kept score against himself plenty. But he tied World Series Game 2 with a solo shot off Pedro Martinez in the fourth, and when the Yankees needed the final out of Game 6, it was Robinson Cano to Teixeira, ballgame, 27th championship. Nobody remembers the batting average from a series you won.)

The 2009 World Series gave the new Yankee Stadium its first ring in its first year of existence, and Teixeira -- flaws and all -- was right in the middle of it.

The Body Started Arguing Back

Here's the part of the Teixeira story that isn't as fun to write, but it's the real one. From 2012 on, this was a war of attrition between a very good first baseman and his own joints and tendons.

A calf strain slowed 2012. A wrist tendon injury -- suffered, of all places, prepping for the freakin' World Baseball Classic -- wrecked 2013 down to 15 games and a .151 average before he had surgery in July. 2014 wasn't much better; he admitted that spring he still didn't trust the wrist to finish a swing without pain. Twenty-two homers in 123 games, which by any normal measure is fine, but this wasn't a normal player anymore. This was a guy managing pain for a paycheck he'd more than earned.

Then 2015 happened, and for one summer it looked like vintage Tex again -- 31 home runs, a third All-Star nod, his first since 2009. Then he fouled a ball off his own shin in August, played through it for weeks because that's what he'd always done, and found out in September it was fractured. Season over. Body: 1. Will: irrelevant against a broken bone.

He hit his 400th career home run on July 3, 2016, at Petco Park -- joining Mickey Mantle, Eddie Murray, Chipper Jones, and Carlos Beltran as the only switch-hitters in history to reach that number. Then, a month later, he stood at a podium at Yankee Stadium and told everyone he was done.

Going Out on His Own Terms

Teixeira didn't get non-tendered. He didn't limp into a trade to a rebuilding club nobody cared about. He walked into a press conference on August 5, 2016, fought back tears, and told the world his kids mattered more than one more grinding, half-healthy season. A month and a half later, on September 28, he hit a walk-off grand slam off Boston's Joe Kelly -- because apparently the man couldn't help himself even on the way out the door.

He played his final game October 2, 2016. Eight years, one championship, three Gold Gloves in pinstripes, and a body that gave out exactly as much as it gave -- which, for $180 million and a ring, is about as fair a trade as either side could've asked for.

The switch-hitting first baseman the Yankees paid for in 2008 delivered a title in year one and kept swinging, hurt or not, right up until the day he decided he was finished. Not many free agent deals age that honestly.