I didn’t really talk about it here on EWC, but I thought ESPN’s outing of Miguel Tejada’s age was outrageous. Classless. Well, at any rate, here’s good story from the Houston Chronicle, mostly concerning the Astros’ Wandy Rodriguez’s road to the majors, talking about how he lied about his age in order to reinvent himself as a pitching prospect after a failed attempt to be signed as an outfielder.
Born Jan. 18, 1979, Wandy Rodriguez persuaded a friend to let him borrow his identity. Cabreja was born Aug. 18, 1981, making him 17 when current Washington Nationals bullpen coach and former Astros minor league pitching coach Ricardo Aponte scouted Rodriguez.
Rodriguez pitched well enough for the Astros to receive a $5,000 signing bonus from scout Julio Linares. By comparison, that year the Astros gave a $725,000 bonus to outfielder Mike Rosamond, their first pick in the supplemental round.
“I gave $500 of that to my uncle and $500 to Coronado,” Rodriguez said.
He took about $300 for himself to buy some clothes and gave his father the rest to buy cattle.
This has me wondering if this ever happens in Asia. What’s to stop an 18-year-old Korean kid from re-enrolling in a baseball school as a freshman? My guess is that it would be a little hard to get by the bureaucrats here.
Read the rest of the article here.
6 responses so far ↓
1 EW // May 5, 2008 at 6:27 am
Yeah, I thought that thing with Tejada was classless, as well, a tactic befitting Jerry Springer or Michael Moore.
2 Gary Garland // May 5, 2008 at 12:32 pm
What are you guys talking about? Given how statistics prove that players generally begin to go downhill around age 33-34, I would say that the age issue is important to MLB teams in how they will spend tens of millions of dollars and how much fans pay at the ticket booth along with that.
The thing is that while I can intellectually understand why Miguel liked about his age and why he may have used steroids, it is just the facts. If players can’t stand the press and baseball historians checking into every last phase of their lives and what they did while in an MLB uniform then they ought to go sell shoes.
Lying about his age isn’t something that would make fans despise Tejada anyway because of the dire poverty he grew up in. The steroids issue, though, is a different kettle of fish.
In any event, nobody has objected to attempts to find out the true age of Satchel Paige or Julio Franco. So how does Tejada earn special treatment?
Moreover, since Tejada is one of the bigger names caught fibbing about his age, it lends us a further historical understanding of the conditions under which Latin players have come to MLB.
Therefore, this calling ESPN “classless” for outing Tejada when the U.S. government had already done that is grossly unfair plus it shows a complete disregard for understanding the totality of the social forces that cause MLB to be what it is at present.
3 jackson // May 5, 2008 at 2:30 pm
Hey Gary
Some good points in there, but I have to disagree with some things:
1. While this would have to researched and proven, my guess is that the vast majority of Dominican players are using baseball as a ticket out of poverty. One remembers stories of Tony Fernandez growing up using a glove made of milk cartons. Suggesting the players go sell shoes kind of implies other abundant work opportunities. If you were in Tejada’s situation and lying about your age was the difference between going to the majors or not, what would you do?
2. The hatchet job, er, interview with Tejada was puportedly on another topic and ESPN blindsided him with the question. I think people took offense to the lack of journalistic ethics involved, not the inquiry into his age.
3. In my own irrelevant personal view, The move was just kind of d-ckish in ESPNs part. I kind of stopped watching them for this reason.
thanks for the message…
4 Barnetto // May 6, 2008 at 2:02 am
I thought it was interesting who they chose to do the Tejada interview… That’s right… you don’t know who it was… No real reporter would want to jeopardize his career by stabbing an interview subject in the back… Jeremy Schaap wouldn’t be caught dead pulling that kind of thing on a player of Tejada’s stature.
5 EW // May 6, 2008 at 6:50 am
Gary,
I wasn’t objecting to the fact that they outed Tejada, just the sensationalist, confrontational way in which they went about it. Journalists who complain ballplayers treat them like garbage have stunts like this to thank. Just run the report with the birth certificate and ask Tejada to comment, either on the air or with a statement. Don’t invite him in for an interview — ostensibly about something else — then ambush him on camera.
6 Shinsano // May 6, 2008 at 12:46 pm
And like Barnetto says, it’s not like it was a sit down interview. It was a faceless reporter.
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