During his 14-year MLB career, Mark Teixeira’s average Wins Above Replacement (WAR) was a respectable 4.4. As a political candidate, Teixeira’s WAR—yes, there’s a platform that measures this sort of thing, and yes, he’s running for office—might very well be the inverse.
It is very likely that Teixeira will soon become the representative for Texas’ 21st congressional district. If he receives this honor, he will do so without putting any meaningful effort into his campaign. Teixeira is a carpetbagger who only recently moved close to, not even within the boundaries of, the district he hopes to represent. His assets portfolio presents endless conflicts of interest. He has zero political experience except for helping push through a school vouchers program so toxic and unpopular that it’s imperiling Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s re-election bid. The “issues” page of his campaign website reads like it was written by ChatGPT 1.0. In interviews, he’s struggled to convey basic policy positions or express why he’s running. The best he could muster to Sean Hannity is that, in 30 or 40 years, he hopes his children look back and say they’re glad their dad “stood up for capitalism and for our free-market economy and for freedom.”
The one thing Teixeira has going for him is that he was great at hitting home runs. Teixeira’s 409 dingers won him celebrity status and landed him the endorsements of Gov. Abbott and President Trump; those endorsements have provided a huge cushion in Texas’s deep-red 21st congressional district, which includes a handful of rural counties and the northern portion of San Antonio. In March, during a crowded primary to fill the soon-to-be-vacated seat of Rep. Chip Roy, Teixeira secured an overwhelming 60.9 percent of the vote, enough to avoid a runoff.
Since then, Teixeira has been accused of only sporadically interacting with potential constituents. House GOP leadership has actually recruited Teixeira to do surrogate work outside of Texas for embattled conservatives in swing districts. Teixeira’s general election opponent, Democratic candidate Kristin Hook, has tried unsuccessfully to set up a debate with him. The Teixeira campaign similarly ignored my repeated interview requests, then sent a three-sentence statement that did not address a detailed list of questions I provided via email.
“Mark and his family are blessed to live in the greatest state in the greatest country on Earth,” wrote Harrison Salter, Teixeira’s campaign manager. “Mark won a crowded 12-candidate primary with over 60 percent of the vote. He is working day and night to secure this critical seat and defend our faith, families, and freedom against a Democrat Party determined to raise our taxes, open our borders, and destroy our oil and gas industry and local small businesses.”
Mark Teixeira’s nickname is “Tex,” which is a good start for a politician in Texas, except that “Tex” is from Maryland. He grew up in Baltimore, then went to Georgia Tech to play college baseball. In 2001, he was drafted by the Texas Rangers (an honest-to-goodness connection!) but crucially, they play in North Texas. After brief stints with the Atlanta Braves and Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, Teixeira signed an eight-year, $180 million contract with the Yankees, which quickly paid off for both parties when the Yankees won the 2009 World Series.
For the entirety of his Yankees tenure, and for a handful of years afterwards as an ESPN analyst, Teixeira lived in Greenwich, Connecticut. In a 2012 interview with a local magazine, Teixeira predicted that his youngest son would graduate from high school there. He made a similar prediction to the Wall Street Journal, though like many wealthy commuters, he conflated New York City and his out-of-state enclave as the same thing. "I live here full-time," he said of Greenwich. "I'm never going to move from New York. My family loves it here.” Teixeira even invoked Greenwich in a cameo on Entourage, one of his favorite shows. “You don’t have three kids in private school in Greenwich, Connecticut, do you, Turtle?" Teixeira complained in the episode.
Like a true politician, Teixeira did not stick to his word that he would never leave New York-slash-Connecticut. As he retells it, Teixeira got the itch for better weather and less Woke. His family moved to Travis County (which includes the city of Austin) in 2021, though Teixeira didn’t quite settle down; for a while, he regularly commuted between Texas and Georgia, where he belatedly obtained his bachelor’s degree at Georgia Tech and also worked in real estate. “When I’m here in Austin, I kind of feel like I’m on vacation,” he said on a podcast in 2024. “When I go to Atlanta, I’m working.”
There’s very little in Teixeira’s upbringing or background to suggest that he’s ever been politically engaged. On a September episode of the Ruthless Podcast, co-hosted by a panel of guys including Mitch McConnell’s former chief of staff and the X account holder of @ComfortablySmug, Teixeira didn’t lay out a very compelling origin story. “My dad was a Navy guy. I was one of those kids that always stood for the national anthem,” he said. “I started getting interested in politics around 2008 when Barack Obama became president and I'm like, ‘Huh, I don't like that.’”
Aside from hosting a few fundraisers for Marco Rubio during his ill-fated 2016 presidential run, Teixeira rarely signaled that he was a politically active right-winger. In the run-up to his congressional primary, the San Antonio Express-News reported that he’d only once voted in a primary. Teixeira’s political radicalization, if you want to call it that, came when he began championing a school vouchers program in Texas: “We obviously should be a school choice state,” he said on a podcast in 2024. During a panel discussion that same year, he added: “If you want to opt out of the craziness, parents should be able to opt out of it.”
Teixeira got his wish in 2025, when an emboldened Texas legislature passed a voucher program that essentially gives $10,000 per child, per year, to families who want to enroll in private schooling. An unusually bipartisan coalition of Texans are already revolting against the program. Hook, Teixeira’s Democratic opponent, told me the vouchers are “a scam making a lot of people a lot of money at the cost of public school students.”
Nevertheless, Teixeira’s efforts (and presumably his $11,000 in cumulative donations to the governor’s re-election campaigns) got him on Abbott’s radar, then got him Abbott’s endorsement. With Abbott and Trump on board—plus $2.75 million in personal loans to the campaign—Teixeira was able to smother the 11 other conservatives who ran against him in the primary. Teixeira won, but his star power and significant financial advantage did not endear him to his opponents. At one point, every GOP candidate running for Texas’s 21st congressional district, save for Teixeira, was in a group chat together. A few have since publicly defected to Teixeira’s side. Others have not.
“Mark has the belief that everything is available for purchase, and he ran on the concept of, if he just throws money at it, it's going to come his way,” one such conservative candidate, who requested anonymity because they’re now involved in a public-facing project, told me. “He's not relatable to the typical person other than, ‘I'm a baseball player and I'm so great.’”
Added Daniel Betts, another primary opponent: “After Thomas Massie, Republican leadership has made clear how little tolerance there is for independent thought in a closely divided Congress. They need team players who will reliably toe the line, and Mark’s record suggests he is well suited to that role.”
Hook, a scientist and former teacher, reiterated that Teixeira’s primary opponents “were not happy with him,” she said. “I don't know how you can say that you're going to serve a community that you are not a part of and have no history in.” Teixeira has admitted that he lives outside the district, but told the San Antonio Express-News that he’s building a separate property within the district lines that he’ll move into if he wins.
Teixeira’s attempts to obscure his carpetbagging include some uninspired stolen valor. An initial campaign ad referred to him as a “Retired Texas Ranger.” In another campaign ad, he boasts, “Raising my family in Texas has been one of the greatest blessings of my life.” (His kids were already teenagers when they relocated to the state.) After eight months of near-silence—a dormant campaign website and no new campaign spots—Teixeira recently released a reheated version of his first ad. It features the same b-roll footage, an opening message that he’s a “Former Texas Ranger,” and an impossible-to-disprove line that he’s “rooted in Texas.”
Teixeira’s off-the-cuff messaging is even weaker than his Texas bonafides. Earlier this month, he said that Ken Paxton has been an “incredible AG.” On a right-wing podcast called Drinkin’ Bros, he made a plea for “lower taxes, lower tax, lower taxes,” referring specifically to property taxes. When one of the podcast hosts asked how to achieve lower property taxes, Teixeira responded, “That's a great question. It really is. Luckily because I'm running for a federal office, I don't have a lot of say. I am just for local control, lower taxes. Let's figure it out.”
On Sean Hannity’s podcast, Teixeira continued his crusade against taxes. “I could probably argue that athletes are taxed at the highest possible rate of any worker in this country,” he complained. He said Democrats are socialists now, and that the problem with socialism is “that everybody wants something for free.” To really drive the point across, he compared socialism to a child asking for ice cream for dinner.
Teixeira’s only other consistent stance is, unsurprisingly, that he’s anti-trans and anti-gay. He told Hannity that if his daughter “was in a locker room and I knew a biological man was in that locker room, my head would explode.” On yet another conservative podcast, he asked why MLB has a Pride Night, and claimed that he would’ve never participated in such an activity. “If you have a Pride Night, then you should have a pro-Israel night and you should have a pro-Christian night and you should have a pro-business night,” he said. “Where does it end?”
These are not the articulations of a candidate who’s put much thought (or effort) into his campaign. At times, Teixeira has come close to admitting that he’s on cruise control. “On March 4, I knew I was going to be in this seat,” Teixeira told the Ruthless Podcast. “The real fight in my campaign was the primary. I worked for six or seven months … It was the hardest thing I've ever had to do other than making the big leagues.”
Hook is not terribly impressed with Teixeira’s work ethic. “He's honestly a lazy candidate, and that's only going to hurt his case,” she said. Her pitch to voters is that they don’t need “another rubber stamp for Trump” in office. “We're now watching the most corrupt administration and president in the history of our country,” she said. “These are people who are motivated by money and power, and there's no reason they would make investments without expecting something in return. I put Mark Teixeira in that category.”
Hook isn’t wrong about Teixeira’s possible conflicts of interest. The Texas Tribune estimates that Teixeira’s net worth is between $48 million and $331 million, which would make him one of the wealthiest people in Congress. Teixeira’s campaign told the Texas Tribune that he and his financial advisers are working on “identifying structures—including a potential qualified blind trust—to remove any financial conflict of interest while in office,” and that the candidate’s goal is to not have to buy or sell individual stocks in Congress.” (Among the questions Teixeira’s campaign didn’t answer when I reached out: Why only a potential blind trust? Why is it only a goal to not buy or sell stocks in Congress?)
According to financial disclosure records, Teixeira owns between $5 million and $25 million of Nvidia stock; $2 to 10 million in gold investments; $1 to $5 million of stock in each of Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft; $500k to $1 million in Lockheed Martin and Chevron stocks; millions in various real estate projects; plus, millions invested in the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries. One of Teixeira’s endorsees, an anti-vaccine group called Texans for Vaccine Choice, did not respond to my request for comment about why they support a candidate who has invested in companies that manufacture vaccines. The Teixeira campaign’s recent donors include Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir and the infamous University of Austin; Stephen Schwarzman, the billionaire CEO of the private equity firm Blackstone; and Ray Davis, majority owner of the Texas Rangers.
In a world that does not exist, Teixeira’s lackadaisical campaign—and his explicit pitch that he, like President Trump, is incorruptible because he’s “already rich and powerful and famous”—would be his downfall. Realistically, it’s doubtful that a blue tsunami scenario would defeat Teixeira in a district where President Trump beat Kamala Harris by a 23-percent margin. (After redistricting, NPR’s Texas Public Radio estimates the new map produces a Trump +22 advantage.)
A narrower-than-expected victory in a ruby-red district obviously shouldn’t elevate Teixeira into a right-wing media darling. But that’s what I expect from a Representative “Tex”: a friendly face on the podcast circuit and the morning shows, someone who can butter up Kristen Welker and Jake Tapper while defending President Trump to the hilt. Who does that help? Who does that serve? Teixeira, certainly. And President Trump. A Yankee showing out for a lifelong New Yorker, just like old times.
