72 million reasons to lie about your age

Mike Burke
Cumberland Times-News

April 20, 2008 01:57 am

— It’s open season on former Baltimore Orioles shortstop Miguel Tejada, apparently, as ESPN has jumped on the Make Miggy Miserable bandwagon along with Sen. George Mitchell and the federal government.
As though Tejada needed any more worries in his once happy-go-lucky Miggy-being-Miggy existence, a reporter for E:60, an ESPN show that is modeled after — what else? — 60 Minutes, ambushed the Houston Astros shortstop on camera with a copy of his birth certificate that shows Tejada is actually two years older than he’s claimed to be since being signed by the Oakland Athletics out of the Dominican Republic as a 17-year-old shortstop.
Or was that a 19-year-old shortstop?
And, oh, ESPN wants to be taken seriously now as a hard-hitting fact-gathering news agency? Just to double check, I Googled Answerbag.com to find out what ESPN stands for, and it said, “ESPN is an abbreviation of Entertainment and Sports Programming Network.”
That’s what I thought. Entertainment. So who died and made the yutz Berman Morley Safer?
In fairness to the yutz, he wasn’t the one who dropped the birth certificate bomb on Miggy. I don’t know what the interviewer’s name is, but I guess we’ll find out on Tuesday when E:60 airs. And I’m sure somewhere in Texas, Rafael Palmeiro will be watching and getting a pretty good chuckle out of it all. Raffy, after all, is still a little sore (in more ways than one) about the time Miggy jabbed him in the fanny with his private stock of “B-12” several days before he tested positive for steroid use. So baseball’s last 500/3,000 guy, who has pretty much been banished from the game despite his continued denials that he ever knowingly used steroids, likely hasn’t minded seeing his former teammate being turned into a talking piñata these days.
After the Houston Chronicle reported Tejada is actually 33, rather than 31, Miggy came clean, saying, “I’m a poor kid that wanted to be a professional big leaguer. I was thinking that was the only way that I could help my family.”
Tejada went on to explain a scout advised him to lie about his age so he could play in a big-time Dominican summer league that didn’t allow players over 17 to take the field. You think he was the only player in that league who had been advised to lie about his age?
Ballplayers lying about their age is a practice as old as the game itself. Remember Luis Tiant? Satchel Paige? In 2003, Alfonso Soriano confessed to the New York Yankees that he was 28, not 26, one year before he was traded to the Texas Rangers.
Closer to home, how about Ed Rogers, the Orioles prospect several years ago who was going to be the next great shortstop? After 9/11, it was discovered Rogers was really two years older than he said he was and he was no longer a hot Single-A prospect. He was finished. Which makes this Tejada thing all the more confusing, because after 9/11, visa requirements were tightened and, according to Baseball America, over 300 players were found to be older than they had been saying they were. In fact, some players were found to be somebody other than who they were saying they were as identities had been changed to get the players off the islands, into the states and into professional baseball.
So how did that wily Miguel Tejada slip through the cracks? He didn’t. As the Chronicle reported, his green card and other documentation all reflect his correct birth date. All of which brings us to the Orioles, who said last week they were shocked, shocked, to find Tejada had lied about his age, claiming they would have never, ever signed the shortstop to such a long contract if they had known his true age.
Now this is an organization that puts potential free agents and trade acquisitions through more thorough physical examinations than an astronaut or the President of the United States undergo, because Lawyer Peter knows medical records. Yet they took a guy they were about to sign to a six-year, $72 million deal at his word on his age, even though it had been rumored for years that Tejada, among many others, was older than he claimed to be?
That’s just pure Birdland malarkey. The Orioles just didn’t bother to check on Tejada’s age, and that’s fine. Nobody complained when the Birds signed Tejada, and nobody should be complaining now since Andy MacPhail was able to acquire five players (and how about that Luke Scott?) for the current-day Minnie Miñoso.
Well, maybe the Houston Astros fans should be complaining, but that’s all right in Bawlmer, hon. After all, the Orioles owed the Astros one, because even though Baltimore once fleeced Houston of Mike Cuellar for Curt Blefary, and Lee May for Enos Cabell and Rob Andrews, the memory of Steve Finley, Curt Schilling and Pete Harnisch for Glenn Davis just never seems to go away.
Mike Burke is sports editor of the Cumberland Times-News. Contact Mike Burke at mburke@times-news.com.