The LoHud Yankees Blog

To the best of my knowledge, YES, ESPN, MLB Network and SNY will have the press conference on live.

I think we’re also going to try some sort of internet magic to stream it live on the LoHud.com main page.

In terms of actual baseball, the Yankees were on the field for two hours and 18 minutes today. It was a standard pitchers and catchers workout. Bullpens, defensive drills, batting practice at the end for the catchers.

None of the players have been told to attend the press conference. But I good number of them will be and I’m sure the cameras will get that shot.

I’m not going to be live-blogging the event as I’ll be there and want to pay attention to what is going on. But check back later. I’m also going to try and upload the audio.

So settle back with some cotton candy and enjoy the circus.

Tony Pena with some of his catchers.

Look, baseball players not named A-Rod.

This is Wang, Hughes, Pettitte, Kennedy and others doing defensive drills.

Derek Jeter was in the clubhouse this morning. He said he will not speak to the media until tomorrow. I’m sure this will lead to some writers ripping Jeter for not supporting A-Rod.

I find that silly. These are well-paid adults. The team captain isn’t in charge of making everybody feel good about themselves. People act like the Yankees are a high school football team.

The media is out in force today. The clubhouse was full of people who couldn’t pick Joba Chamberlain out of a lineup. A few will linger around for a few days but eventually they’ll go away. Don’t forget, A-Rod will leave camp for the WBC on March 2.

To try and preserve some of my sanity, I’m going to go watch The Wanger throw his bullpen now.

By the time you finish reading this sentence, Alex Rodriguez may have hired another paid advisor to help him handle today’s press conference. Here is my advice — and it’s free:

1. Admit everything you did in an opening statement. Get ahead of the upcoming book and marginalize it. You know better than Selena Roberts or anybody else what you actually did or didn’t do. Beat her to the punch. List the drugs, list the dates and apologize for it. What else can they do to you then? Do not use the word “culture.” You did the steroids, not the culture.

2. Thank the team for coming and apologize for being such a distraction … again.

3. Make some kind of grand gesture to get the public on your side. Say you will donate those bonus payments for the home run plateaus to charity. Or announce that every kid at every Boys and Girl Club in America can go to a game free on you if they sign a pledge not to do drugs. Whatever it is, make some sort of financial gesture.

4. Don’t sit up there for an hour, but answer a reasonable amount of questions. I find many of the questions people think he “needs” to answer to be inconsequential. But he does have to be accountable to some degree.

5. At the end say, “Out of respect for my teammates and our upcoming season, this is the last time I will talk about this subject. Only baseball from here on out.” Then stick to that.

6. Try and act like a normal person for the rest of the year. Stay off the gossip pages. Fire all those advisors and listen to your conscience. Treat people the way you’d like to be treated. Say what is on your mind, not what you think you should say.

Oh, and drive in 135 runs or so. That would really help.

You know it’s not going to be a fun day of journalism when you pull into the parking lot and six television trucks are jockeying for parking spaces at 8:05 a.m. Meanwhile some dude in a suit and long hair is walking around the press box talking with an English accent into his phone.

Even the British, it seems, are interested in A-Rod.

What would have to happen in the workout today to get in the paper? I can’t imagine. Jeter should announce today that’s getting married and moving to center field. Nobody would care.

One of the Yankees, can’t remember who, is going to have a press conference today. Seems like a lot of teammates will be going.

Mark Teixeira checked in for camp and said the steroid culture in Texas never enveloped him. This notebook also has updates on CC Sabathia and Jose Molina.

Mike Borzello, one of A-Rod’s friends, believes he will overcome this.

Here’s how big A-Rod is, he’s even on the cover of The New Yorker.

There is no hiding from this story.

(Props to the artist, Barry Blitt. He got the socks right.)

Joe Girardi today:

“I thought the big thing was that Andy came clean (last year). Nothing else came out, which helped it die down. When a person comes clean and there’s nothing else to drag out, it’s going to die down.”

At last count (and the list grows longer every day), Alex has an sports agent, a lawyer, a crisis-management firm, a PR flack, a talent agency and a Hollywood agent advising him what to do.

But Andy Pettitte got it right last year without any help. Answer every question, tell the truth and be done with it. Once you answer all the questions, there are no more questions to answer. It sounds simple but it is true.

Pettitte said he was motivated by one thing: Trying to be as less of a distraction to the team as possible. “I thought if I handled it right the first time, it would fade away and it did. You know everything is going to come out anyway,” he said.

That is question tomorrow. Will A-Rod be motivated by what is right for the Yankees or what is right for himself? Those two lines connect somewhere. But with Alex, you’re never quite sure where that is.

To hear Alex Rodriguez tell the tale, a player had almost no choice but to use drugs when playing for the Texas Rangers at the start of the decade. There was a “loosey-goosey” clubhouse culture and the oppressive heat in the summer wearing the players down.

Maybe he was right. In addition to A-Rod, Rafael Palmeiro, Pudge Rodriguez, John Rocker and Juan Gonzalez are among the Rangers who have been tied to PED use.

But Mark Teixeira, who made his debut in 2003, denied being involved when asked about his time in Texas.

“When I was a rookie, I had a one-track mind and that was to learn the big leagues. I didn’t really see anything else going on and nobody really talked about any kind of steroids. It was definitely kept quiet. I had no idea that anybody was taking anything,” he said.

Teixeira is the son of a former Navy pilot and a schoolteacher. John and Margie Teixeira ran a tight ship, he said.

“I grew up in a family (where) there was zero tolerance. There were no drugs; there was no alcohol. That kind of stuff just didn’t fly,” Teixeira said.

Teixeira went on to say that he considers PEDs a drug like any other and advocated cleaning up the game. He is a member of the MLBPA executive board and believes the group is doing all it can to eradicate PED use. He said that while he was disappointed in A-Rod, it’s not his place to judge him.

I’m not sure I believe the MLBPA is doing all it can. But Teixeira seems like an earnest guy. If you listened to the audio of his interview, he certainly knows how to handle himself in an interview setting.