Article:Miguel Tejada, You just got Punkd!

Having a hot Latina Pop-star for a Wife: Totally Sweet Winning the 2004 Home-Run Derby: Who isn't Jealous? Winning the 2002 AL MVP: Not to Shabby Getting totally humiliated on national TV: PRICELESS.

So not only does Miguel Tejada get traded for a day before he appears in the Mitchell Report, he now gets busted for lying to get a contract. While he certainly tread some morally gray waters, I can't say I don't blame the man for doing what he had to do to get into the MLB. In fact, I don't even care that he lied, Billy Beane and co. should've done some better homework, I mean if some jerk-off at E60 can do it, you'd assume they could've too.

The thing that totally chaps my ass about the whole ordeal is this: How often when the Mitchell Report came up did you see Roger Clemens and Andy Petite wearing Astros' uniforms on ESPN? I can recall Roger being in the Astros' uniform on the front page of ESPN.com with some sort of tawdry steroid headline right above it. I mean for guys who spent three years with an organization when there careers have spanned a decade and decade plus respectively, was that necessary? Did the E60 guy have to sit down with Miggy in his Astros uniform and bait him into making an ass of himself? Why didn't they try to do this when he was Baltimore, when get got his contract or after he got implicated by Palmerio? Everyone knows the huge East Coast sport's bias that fuels ESPN, but really was pulling this stunt with Miguel Tejada or the afformentioned unnecessary linkage of steriod-Roger with the Astros? As much as I love sports and baseball especially, network television kind of ruins it (however, FSN or RSN type networks' coverage of sporting events is actually a HELL of a lot better than ESPN, FOX, TNT, etc) To quote the brilliant Steve Goldmen:

[http://baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=6947 ESPN’s brass has lost all faith in sports as drama. This I don’t get, but it appears to be the case. The addition of music-video editing patterns, bad pseudo-metal soundtracks, and visual augmentation of highlights, and the cringe-worthy hip banter between anchors slightly too old to really be using urban lingo has made SportsCenter a test of endurance, not a destination on the dial...like MTV before it, ESPN seems to be convinced that the hype around the core of the offering is of more utility than the core offering itself. I mean, who the hell came up with “Who’s Now?”, and why weren’t they summarily beaten with a big-ass sack of oranges? And why didn’t one of the “talent” speak up and say “You must be joking, right? I’m not doing that crap.” If, before, anyone had even grudging respect for Stuart Scott and all the unindicted co-conspirators who served on the panels, I hope you’ve had the good sense to write them off as the empty and fungible vessels they are. Admit it—it’d be pretty cool to have the anchors off-camera, doing a voice over of what comes up on the teleprompter, and have a turnip, motionless, on the anchor desk. Would the viewer experience be worse? What percentage of the audience would comment that Scott Van Pelt “looks a little jaundiced this evening”?]

Simply summed, while Miguel Tejada's age certainly might factor into his baseball-ability, it doesn't seem to this year so far and it's hard to blame the man for lying to get out of extreme poverty when MLB's millions came knockin' at his door. What we should all be disgusted with is ESPN's inability to do anything besides come up with this kind of "To Catch a Predator" rip off.