As much fun as it would be to pick at ESPN for its "expose" of Miguel Tejada, promoted so aggressively before airing in full this week, it is more instructive to dig into what could have -- and should have -- been exposed.
Long ago, as the Worldwide Leader informed us, as a young ballplayer trying to leverage baseball as his escape from the unfathomable poverty of his Dominican upbringing, Tejada lied about his age. This supposedly was a path to insight about the former Oriole and current Houston Astro.
Had the network and its crack investigative team suppressed its "gotcha" desire, uncovered similar information about a number of Latino major leaguers (off-camera), then tied them in to the bigger picture, it would have led to far more insight.
We might have found out why Tejada and others have done it for so long, what about baseball allowed them to do it, how baseball profited from it, what could be done -- indeed, if anything should be done -- about it.
Granted, that's a lot to squeeze into one segment of an hour-long show, and you can only dramatically whip out so many birth certificates between commercials. As it was, the only thing distinguishing this from your average episode of Maury was a screaming studio audience.
Still, it would have been educational, rather than sensational. For one thing, we'd be reminded that this is not a new phenomenon. Teams have known all along that obtaining 100-percent factual information about Latino players' names, birth dates and other vitals was an adventure, that the incentive for hoodwinking some scout or executive was as powerful as life and death itself.
Yet they keep heading to Central and South America and the Caribbean for players. Building more academies. Parceling out scandalously small bonuses to desperate young men and their families. Shipping them all over North America, herding the best of them into the majors, cashing in on their skills.
If a couple of 19-year-olds look young enough to pass for 17, so be it. The same if a couple of 15-year-olds manage to pass for 16. They're not being vetted for Cabinet posts, they're playing baseball. And, in baseball's eyes, better a $2,000 investment in a player like Tejada (that's what he signed for originally with the Oakland Athletics) than possibly millions in bonuses to an American star taken in the draft.
