The Incredible Secret of Mark Teixeira

At the risk of this becoming the Tex blog, I just discovered something that made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end.

We all know Tex isn't getting any younger, but hope that his home run stroke and power numbers can somehow come back to where they were a few years ago.

And I have some evidence that this may be possible, after all.

Below is a photo of Douglas Fairbanks selling war bonds in 1918 in Manhattan's financial district. I've been using it as my desktop background for a few days (I like historical NYC photos as desktops, what can I say?), but about 10 minutes ago I made a startling discovery.

Look closely at the crowd in the lower right-hand corner. Here's a blowup of it.

Could it be? Sure looks like him. And remember, this is from 1918!

He seems to be in his early 20s in the photo. Which would make him in his 120s today!! Of course, if he has been around that long, he's either a vampire (real vampires can actually survive in daylight, the night-only thing is a Hollywood embellishment) or discovered the Fountain of Youth (previously sought but never found by 16th-century Florida explorer Sidney de Ponson), or maybe he's like Captain Jack on "Torchwood" and "Doctor Who" and is simply immortal and even if killed comes back to life.

Whatever the answer is, he's been able to keep this fantastic secret from the hoi polloi for a long time. I don't know what kind of special effects he's using to appear to be aging (although the guy still looks pretty damn young) or if there's anything with regard to healing time that we should know about (a 120-year-old guy can be expected to take a little longer to come back from a bad wrist injury, after all).

But my mind is blown. Even more than when Nick told me in the comments that Ichiro fell down and missed a fly ball last night, a play I happened to miss because we had company over.

THIS...CHANGES...EVERYTHING. 25 or 30 HRs might just be a piece of cake from here.

Awesome.