The importance of Mark Teixeira.

I’ve been doing this for more than 18 years. I started before Mark Teixeira was a professional baseball player, and there’s at least a decent chance I’ll be doing it after that, too.

Strange feeling.

He and a fellow Georgia Tech Yellow Jacket are the two greatest first-round draft picks in Texas Rangers history, but Teixeira, for me, gets the nod over Kevin Brown not just because of his exceptional career but also because of how he impacted the Rangers in the way that, fair or not, most of us will remember him.

Back when the Newberg Report started in 1998 (the Newberg Minor League Report, actually), I committed to writing seven days a week, mostly about the Rangers’ farm system, and kept that…