Maybe He Just Forgot? I Do Sometimes…

For the past several days, ESPN has been making a big deal about revealing Miguel Tejada’s “secret past.” What, is he a former drug runner? Did he used to be a pirate? Did he used to date Paris Hilton?

No.

Apparently, Tejada is actually 33 instead of 31, and this is the earth-shattering news that ESPN is breaking.

Certainly in an industry where you sign long-term contracts for a great deal of money based on expected future performance (and age plays a large part in that), you’d like to know how old a guy is.

But really, who is surprised by this? Aside from the fact that Tejada has already lied about his past HGH usage, he’s also from the Dominican Republic, where players are notoriously bad about claiming to be younger than they actually are:

• Remember Danny Almonte, the 12-year old Little League phenom who was the media darling in 2001 until it was revealed that he was actually 14?
• Remember Rafael Furcal, who at one point set the Major League record for most stolen bases by an 18-year old, but then he turned out to be 21?
• Remember Julio Franco, who everyone thought was the oldest player in the Major Leagues and then turned out to actually be the oldest human being on the planet?

The point is, this happens all the time, so the Astros shouldn’t be too surprised or too upset.

It’s kind of like with my cousin Will, who used to severely exaggerate his intramural basketball statistics. It didn’t make me mad, I just realized eventually that if I wanted accurate numbers, I just needed to take whatever numbers he told me and divide them by three.

It’s the same way in Major League Baseball—when a ballplayer from the Dominican Republic tells you how old he is, you automatically add a couple years to it because you don’t expect him to actually give you his correct age.

As for Tejada, well he was mentioned in the Mitchell Report and has apparently lied to a Federal Grand Jury about using HGH, so has enough legitimate baggage already without trying to make a big deal about this age thing.

The picture above is from the cover of the 2005 Baltimore Orioles Media Guide. I’m sure that putting Tejada, Rafael Palmeiro and Sammy Sosa on the cover seemed like a great idea at the time.

The Apple of ESPN’s Eye, or The Yankees/Red Sox Rivalry

Although it probably shouldn’t be this way, I’ve pretty much decided that all forms of media are biased in some way.

The Fox News Channel is conservative, while virtually every other news channel is slanted to the left. Around here in Northwest Arkansas, some media outlets rabidly support Arkansas football coach Houston Nutt, while others are decidedly against him.

Bias is a part of media; I guess I shouldn’t expect ESPN to be any different.

Yesterday, the Atlanta Braves and the New York Mets battled each other in a classic game. Future Hall of Famers and former teammates John Smoltz and Tom Glavine pitched gems through five innings.

Atlanta got to Glavine in the 6th to take a 3-1 lead, but the Mets responded in the bottom half of the inning. New York touched Smoltz for five runs, highlighted by a José Reyes bases clearing triple and Braves manager Bobby Cox being thrown out of the game for arguing balls and strikes.

Down 6-3 and facing the Mets’ formidable bullpen, Atlanta tied it up in the 7th with an Edgar Renteria three-run home run, and then surged ahead in the 8th with another three-run shot, this one by Kelly Johnson.

The Mets threatened in the 8th and 9th but failed to score, and Atlanta held on for the victory, which gave them a half-game lead over the Mets for the NL East lead and put the rest of the league on notice that the Braves are back.

It was quite a game, but apparently, only warranted about 60 seconds of the 90 minute ESPN Sportscenter broadcast that night. Certainly, there were a lot of sports to cover yesterday with the opening of the NBA playoffs, but ESPN may have had more time to recap the Braves/Mets game if they hadn’t spent 10 minutes going over the highlights the Yankees/Red Sox game.

The New York/Boston game was significant; the Red Sox win gave Boston its first sweep of the Yankees at Fenway since the early 1990s, the BoSox hit four consecutive home runs in the game for the first time in team history (the last time any AL team did that was in 1964) and Dice-K was pitching.

It was a good game, but it didn’t merit 10 times the coverage of the Braves/Mets game.

But if you watch much ESPN, this shouldn’t be surprising. The network that is infamous for portraying the Duke Blue Devils as a contender for the NCAA basketball championship in a season when they are barely treading water in ACC play always blows the New York/Boston rivalry way out of proportion.

The Yankees and Red Sox have been playing each other for a long time, since 1903 actually, which is part of the rivalry, and New York and Boston are geographically close to each other (only 214 miles separate the two cities, almost exactly the distance between Fayetteville and Searcy), which adds to it as well.

But actually, throughout most of baseball history, the New York/Boston rivalry really hasn’t been much of a rivalry at all, especially to the Yankees, who have basically been dominating their chowder-eating counterparts for 85+ years now—since 1920, New York has won 39 pennants and 26 World Series Championships while Boston has won 5 pennants and 1 World Series Crown during that same span.

Sure, there have been a few moments of intrigue and points of contention over the years—the Babe Ruth trade and resulting “Curse,” the personal rivalry of Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams in the 1940s, the Bucky Dent home run to send the Yankees to the playoffs in 1978 and Boston’s dramatic come-from-behind ALCS victory over New York in 2004—but any two teams who had played in the same division for 100+ years would have similar episodes.

Is there a rivalry between these two teams? Absolutely, and it is one that has intensified over the last decade with the re-emergence of both teams as perennial contenders.

But it still remains the most overplayed and trumped-up rivalry in all of professional sports, more the product of myopic, overzealous northeastern sportswriters than of history.

And seriously, the rest of us are getting tired of it.