When most of us leave high school, we leave behind the principal, too.

Mark Teixeira's closest confidant, outside his kin, is Barry Fitzpatrick, principal at Mount St. Joseph, in south Baltimore.

When most of us get to college, we anticipate a long experimental search through various Mr. and Ms. Rights and Wrongs before we find the lifelong match.

Mark Teixeira went to a party at Georgia Tech his freshman year and met Leigh. "I found the girl I'm going to marry," he told Fitzpatrick over the phone the next day, and he indeed did.

Most of us vaguely realize that the world will land hard on us one day. We just never think it will be today, or tomorrow.

By the time he left Baltimore, Teixeira had endured one long close call and one cruel, thunderclap morning.

His mother Margy survived a fight with breast cancer that lasted through Teixeira's high school years.

His friend Nick Liberatore was killed by a sleeping trucker on Interstate 95, as Teixeira prepared to play an American Legion game back home. They had just wished each other luck on their college boards.

What damage Teixeira suffered was either locked away or deflected.

"The defining events of his life," Fitzpatrick said.

What the Angels have seen, the past two months, is a player with great measurables --- a .356 average and 13 homers and 43 RBIs in 54 games --- and a rapt professionalism.

"He's the rock," said Scott Boras, his agent. "He's the type of client that I'd let stay in my house --- which I did, after he got traded here."

"If you can come up with something negative about Tex, you're doing some pretty strong nitpicking," said Tom Grieve, Texas' former general manager and now a broadcaster.

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Teixeira, 28, arrives at the six-year free agency milepost with a .290 lifetime average. He has averaged 33.8 home runs and 113 RBIs per season. His OPS (on-base percentage, plus slugging) is .919, which is fourth among actives under 30.

He also is a Gold Glove first baseman. Against the Yankees in September, he landed on his backside in trying to field a wicked, spinning grounder and reached out with his right hand to grab it on a sideways bounce. It was an impossibly coordinated play that showed how different these guys can be.

But in the clubhouse he isn't different at all.

"It's been fun being here," Teixeira said. "Spending every day in Laguna Beach and then coming to the ballpark, it's like being on vacation and working at the same time. But the biggest thing is getting into the playoffs with this team."

No one knows about next year. Teixeira has a sister in Hoboken, N.J., and he liked the old Yankee Stadium, which lent its dimensions to the one that opens next spring.

Baltimore might appeal, too. He and his friends --- Liberatore, Michael Floyd, Kevin Dietz, Chris Taraldo --- spent lots of nights in both the old and new Baltimore ballparks.

"Those guys did everything together," Fitzpatrick said. "Michael's brother Gavin pitches for the White Sox now."

Fitzpatrick nodded.

"The day was June 9, 1997."

The kids had finished their junior year. Three cars headed for Six Flags New Jersey. One needed assistance, so they all pulled over, and almost everyone got out and sat on a grassy bank.

Nick Liberatore stayed in a back seat and was finishing a cellphone call. It was 9 a.m.

"The ones on the bank saw it happen," Fitzpatrick said. "I wound up doing a lot of counseling."

Teixeira wasn't there, but his early stages of grief became outreach. He and the gang showed up for dinner at the Liberatores, every Wednesday night, to share everything warm and raw they remembered. Then Teixeira established a Nick Liberatore scholarship program.

"Those guys are very special to us," said Larry Liberatore, Nick's father. "They all became our family."

Teixeira's own family faced the brink. Fitzpatrick remembers Margy, sitting bundled up in a folding chair at chilly Mount St. Joseph games in the spring, defying the chemotherapy treatments.

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His dad, John, also had a brain tumor that, while benign, cost him his hearing in his left ear. John played high school baseball with Bucky Dent in Miami. He chose the Naval Academy instead of the majors, and flew P-3s before he retired.

The arrival of the Red Sox for the Division Series brings up 10-year-old acrimony. Teixeira was only drafted in the ninth round in 1998, even though he won high school All-America honors. Boston offered him $1.5 million before the draft, asked him to commit to it, picked him, and then wouldn't budge, and Teixeira proceeded to Georgia Tech.

Three years later Texas took Teixeira with the fifth overall pick and gave him a four year, $9.5 million major league contract that included a $4 million bonus. Teixeira only spent one year in the minors.

"I'm glad it happened, looking back," he said. "I learned very early that baseball is a business and I haven't lost sight of that."It's liberating, to live without illusions.

For however long it lasts, Teixeira and the Angels walk into October linked by the belief that life is little more than a one-game series.

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