Yankees doctors recommend surgery for Mark Teixeira's wrist

For the battered and bruised Yankees, it seems to be bad news after bad news. According to the Yankees themselves, team doctors have recommended that Mark Teixeira have surgery on his injured right wrist, and Daniel Barbarisi seems to have confirmed that the Yankees will take that advice, leaving their first baseman done for the year.

Teixeira injured his wrist early in March as he prepared to play for Team USA in the world baseball classic. Since then, he's only managed to make his way into 15 games, hitting a dismal .151/.270/.340. Given that, this doesn't seem like such a big hit for the Yankees, who have stayed within 2.5 games of the Red Sox despite some serious roster problems and, more tellingly, an even 297 runs scored and allowed on the year.

What this does mean, though, is a light at the end of the tunnel extinguished, as it were. The Yankees have been playing with some expectation that the second half of the season might bring a reprieve. And while it still might in some areas, for now there's one less possible savior in the mix.

And for the Red Sox...well, let's just say missing out on Teixeira is looking like one big bullet dodged. Teixeira's first year with the Yankees was exceptional, but since then he's been middling, hitting just .249/.345/.479. And now he's out for the rest of the year with the specter of a wrist injury looming over him. Just ask David Ortiz and Will Middlebrooks how easy it is to bounce back from those.

Don't call it schadenfreude, because there's more to it than that. Call it some level of relief in the midst of a very close division race, and comfort in the knowledge that Boston's big signings aren't the only ones who've come up short of expectations.

And then hope that the baseball Gods don't see fit to exact vengeance through one Clay Buchholz.

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