When you saw him leap and dive and hit, you wanted more. His dynamism was irresistible. You had to watch Miguel Tejada because you never knew what he’d do next. He arrived out of nowhere, a shoe-shiner from Baní, in the Dominican Republic. He was not a prospect. He made himself a prospect. He forced you to pay attention.
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Ramón Hernández was with him in the A’s Dominican Summer League in 1994. He remembers that Tejada told his coaches, “Move me wherever you want; I don’t care.” His bat would take care of the rest. He was right. He soon signed a contract for $2,000. The A’s weren’t going to shell out too much money for an unproven entity, but they’d give him a shot.
That was all he needed. Tejada headed to Medford, Ore., in 1995, thousands of miles from home, to play with the A’s short-season team in the Northwest League at the time. He watched Disney cartoons to learn English. One of his teammates was Ryan Christenson, who is now the A’s bench coach. Christenson called his father after their first practice, with a concerned tone. “If every player is like this, I’m in trouble,” he said.
All those leaps and dives and hits, and then one day, Tejada was gone. Somehow, his stay in the big leagues seemed short, even after 16 years. Those who knew him weren’t surprised. Tejada, when he was standing there, with those warm eyes and soft smile, was always available, speaking with an unshakeable familiarity that is often lost when ballplayers reach his level of stardom. But he could disappear just as easily. And he would return on his own terms, effervescent and beaming, as if he had never left.
He’d change his phone number a couple of times a year. The teams he played for had trouble reaching him. When he was with the Orioles, the team once tried to contact Tejada before signing Hernández, to no avail. He contacted a reporter during the Winter Meetings, demanding a trade for reasons that still aren’t clear. But he wasn’t traded and he reported to spring training, less effervescent than usual.
When he retired in 2013, his legacy bruised and his ego fractured after a PED suspension, this pattern only continued. The A’s invited him to alumni events, reunions of those early 2000s teams, and he never showed.
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“You spoke with Miggy? Where is he?” asked A’s director of alumni and family relations, Detra Paige, last month.
“I don’t know why he hasn’t returned. I don’t know if there’s something he’s avoiding,” Christenson said.
The Orioles haven’t had luck, either. Tejada has not stepped foot in Camden Yards in seven years.
It took five months to reach him. You tried four numbers. None of them worked. You tried to go through three of his longtime friends in the Dominican Republic. None of them answered. Last you heard, he was living on a chicken farm in Florida, but no one seemed to know where exactly. Then one day in April, he posted a video on Instagram, for the first time in two years. And another two days later. And another the day after that.
He was back.
Better contact him before he disappears again, a Dominican friend says. He answers your message almost immediately. “Claro que me encantaría poder conversar con usted,” he replied. Of course, I would love to talk with you. As if it were a foregone conclusion; as if he had been waiting for your call.
So you talk for about an hour and he tells you that not only is he back, but he wants to stay awhile. He wants to return to the team that gave him his first shot — his only shot. He wants to be a hitting coach for the A’s.
Derek Jeter, Nomar Garciaparra, Omar Vizquel, Alex Rodríguez and Tejada. In the golden era of shortstops, he was right there, with all of them. Six-time All-Star, 2002 AL MVP, and that wasn’t just because of his offense, which was mighty; his range was also incredible. He caught balls he wasn’t supposed to catch. He led the league in assists by a shortstop seven times.
He chased down everything. That was just the way he played. Tejada showed power not only in his bat but in every movement. This passion was shaped early, under the tutelage of Enrique Soto, a former Giants minor leaguer. According to “Away Games,” by Marcos Bretón and José Luis Villegas, a teenage Tejada would practice those dives and leaps on the sandlots of Baní, and when he wasn’t hustling enough, Soto would scream, “You know where you are from, Miguel! Do you ever want to get out?”
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He’d practice writing his signature, too, over and over again, until he knew every curve and stroke by heart, so could sign a contract, sign an autograph. He’d memorize his parents’ names, birthdays; any information a big-league team might need to know about him.
A’s broadcaster Ken Korach remembers that even when Tejada was a rookie, he would run with reckless abandon down the line or into left field in an attempt to catch every popup — a daunting task in the Coliseum’s ocean of foul territory.
“They had to reel him in,” Korach said.
His swing was compact, just like his body: 5-foot-9, 220 pounds. He quickly earned the nickname “La Gua Gua” — the bus. He finished his career with numbers that would make some Hall of Fame voters notice: his .285 career average, 307 home runs, 1,302 RBIs and .791 OPS are comparable to other shortstops who have a plaque in Cooperstown, like Robin Yount and Alan Trammell. Of course, he had raw talent, but many would say that Tejada willed his way into the big leagues, and willed his way to stay there.
When Art Howe first heard about him, he was skeptical. The kid had shown glimpses of power but needed some serious polishing. He committed 45 errors in High A in 1996, so in August of 1997, Howe, the A’s manager at the time, didn’t think he was big-league ready.
“He’s kicking the ball around, left and right, and I’m thinking, I’m not too anxious to have him on my team,” Howe recalled.
Then he saw his work ethic. If a manager or coach had constructive criticism for Tejada, they only needed to say it once. Howe had a chat with him about those errors, and every morning after that chat, Tejada would work with third-base coach Ron Washington before the day’s workouts.
This didn’t stop once Tejada started to feel more comfortable defensively. Howe says it continued for as long as the shortstop was with the A’s. Washington would show up to Tejada’s locker and say, “Let’s get the work in,” and off they went.
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A few years later, Tejada hit into a double play and didn’t run all the way to first base. Howe took him out of the game. Afterward, Tejada showed up to his office, tears streaming down his face.
“He told me, ‘From now on, I’ll run all the way to the right-field wall,’” Howe said. “Miggy was never going to accept being average. He just wasn’t.”
Perhaps no number encapsulates Tejada’s insatiable desire for greatness better than his 2,171 games played. He rattled off six straight seasons in which he played the full 162; his streak of 1,152 consecutive games played is the fifth-longest all-time. And those are just the games he played on North American soil.
“Forget Cal Ripken,” said Manny Acta, who managed Tejada in the Caribbean Series in 2004. “The amount of games Miguel played will never be done again. He returned almost every year to play for his country — winter ball, the Caribbean Series, the World Baseball Classic — and he didn’t return to embarrass himself. He played all-out, lunging, sliding, diving. He was a stud.”
Dominican fans loved him more than some of their other stars because he always came back. He not only played there in the winter but lived in Baní for a few offseasons during his baseball career. Hernández said Tejada would return with everything he could fit in his suitcase — shoes, uniforms, equipment — and hand it out to kids on the street. He never forgot where he came from; if anything, it seemed like it was always at the forefront of his mind. For many, with every passing year, childhood feels more and more like a distant memory, but Tejada never let it slip away. They could never live like that again.
According to Bretón and Villegas, Tejada was born malnourished. He began working around kindergarten, shining shoes. He dropped out of school at 11 to work in a garment factory. One time, Soto went into his home and found him asleep in a hole in a mattress.
When they were playing together in the Dominican Summer League, Hernández asked him why he chose to stay the weekend at the A’s facility. They only played Monday through Friday; most Dominican players went home on the weekends.
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“I have it good here,” Tejada told him. “We have three meals a day, air conditioning, a bed of your own.”
Hernández visited Baní with Tejada that season and suddenly his friend’s choice made much more sense. It was a small house, with four windows, divided into four parts, but he wouldn’t call them rooms, per se. They were portioned-off sections. There was no floor; just dirt. Tejada had nine siblings. His mother died young and his father wasn’t around much.
At first, Tejada fought Hernández on the idea of visiting Baní. He didn’t want him to see his life there.
“Miguel was worried I would feel uncomfortable,” he said. “He was worried more about me than himself. But he will always love that little town.”
He loved it to his own detriment. Writers who covered Tejada will tell you that he always had an entourage around him — family, friends from Baní. He would often show up to the team plane or bus late because he was paying all of their hotel bills. He had a hard time saying no. For so long, he had nothing to give. Now, a couple of multimillion-dollar contracts later, he had everything to give.
That entourage soon expanded to include agents, business partners, advisors. To many, it seemed like Tejada’s rapid ascension to stardom didn’t change him but rather, it changed those who gravitated to him.
“Some people took advantage of Miguel,” Acta said. “I know he had some issues with bad investments on real estate, some trouble financially (after he retired). He was building this hotel, was building a residential complex, and it flamed out.
“It was because of the person that he is. He trusted people.”
When Acta thinks about Tejada, he tries to focus on the positives: The man whose love for the game was only surpassed by his love for his hometown.
“El Pelotero de la Patria,” he says. “The player of our country.”
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“I block those negative thoughts out,” Acta adds a moment later.
There are parts of Tejada’s legacy that are difficult to digest. Perhaps no one embodies the concept of nuance better than the longtime shortstop, who wore his empathy for the world to see but made one poor decision after another.
Who could forget the birth certificate debacle? In 2008, while he was playing for the Astros, ESPN obtained a copy of his birth certificate from the Dominican government and realized Tejada had been claiming he was two years younger than he actually was. “E:60” correspondent Tom Farrey asked him about it in an interview. Tejada stormed off the set.
Then, of course, there were the steroid allegations. In 2005, Rafael Palmeiro tested positive for steroids and told ESPN that it entered his body through a supplement he received from Tejada; Tejada denied it. A year later, a Los Angeles Times report named Tejada as a user of anabolic steroids, and he denied that, too.
In 2007, the Mitchell Report was published; included in the report was that Adam Piatt, a former teammate of Tejada’s with the A’s, agreed to provide him with testosterone and human growth hormone. Piatt said he didn’t know if Tejada used either substance or not, but Piatt provided checks from Tejada that proved the transaction occurred.
In 2009, Tejada was charged with lying to Congressional investigators about Palmeiro’s steroid use. He sat in the courtroom with headphones on, listening to the terms of his plea agreement translated into Spanish and pleaded guilty on Feb. 11; the first star of the steroid era to do so. He was sentenced to one-year probation.
The cameras were flashing, and his voice was cracking, and the tears weren’t going to wait for his apology, but he got it out as best he could, as quickly as he could.
“I really apologize because I don’t want to be in the situation,” he said then. “I apologize to the whole United States because this country give me the opportunity to be who I am. And the last thing I want to do is let this country down.”
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He ran into more trouble in his final season with the Royals, when he was suspended for 105 games after testing positive twice for Adderall. Tejada told Enrique Rojas of ESPN that he had been using it for the past five years and had medical permission from MLB that had recently expired.
“It’s a shame because I really liked him a lot as a teammate,” Royals pitcher James Shields said then.
The 105-game ban was the third-longest non-lifetime suspension MLB had ever handed down.
And then, in 2015, the same signature that Soto had him write over and over until it was forever cemented in his memory, the signature that was only ever meant to grace a baseball or a jersey or a photograph, ended up on a petition declaring bankruptcy in the Southern District of Florida. How distant those penmanship sessions in the Dominican sun must have felt that day.
You ask him where he disappeared to, and why, and Tejada gives you many reasons, and you let him list them all, one by one.
He wanted to spend time with his family (he mentions this three times). He started a baseball academy in the Dominican Republic. He doesn’t like flying. He owned properties he had to take care of. There was the chicken farm, in Florida. He adds that he loves his life now, in the Dominican — he wakes up at 5 in the morning, and spends all day teaching young ballplayers — “those ballplayers listen,” he says — and that leaves him fulfilled.
It was a hard transition at first. The game was so embedded in his identity that he had to learn how to live without it. Or, at least, how to live without playing it almost every single day, as he had for so long.
The academy has helped with that. So has working with his 18-year-old son, Miguel Jr., who is a stocky shortstop with good bat speed, just like his father, and is playing in the Phillies organization. They’ve been training every day he’s home.
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“Don’t take this beautiful game for granted,” he tells his son. “Not many get the chance you do. Respect the uniform you wear.”
As is often the case with Tejada, some may find this advice contradictory, given the decisions he’s made in the past. Miguel Jr. has already made a controversial one of his own: In 2018, he tested positive for the steroid Stanozolol. He was 15 years old at the time and was set to join the White Sox organization; the White Sox decided not to sign him after the news came out.
“I felt bad about it,” Tejada says of his son’s positive test. “I never suspected anything. I thought it was very strange that the results came out that way. Honestly, it’s something that I still don’t understand, but it happened. I’ve stressed with him that the most important thing is for him to follow his conscience and that he shouldn’t do that. It was a mistake in his career but thankfully it happened early and now he knows the consequences of that kind of error.”
The Phillies have signed 17-year-old Miguel Tejada Jr.
Video from when I saw him play in the DPL: https://t.co/szqBmjczr9 pic.twitter.com/H5Kjtln5pN
— Ben Badler (@BenBadler) March 2, 2019
Tejada says that he didn’t want to throw himself into coaching, and now he feels ready. Why is he ready now? He says, from a mental standpoint, it’s time.
Does it have something to do with his legacy? Is he concerned about how fans might receive him back in the United States, given his connection to PED use?
“I don’t think it’s going to be a big issue; it was something that happened in my past, but why revisit it? It’s in the past now,” he says. “My experience as a player will be more important. My effectiveness as a player will allow me to have a positive influence on young players. I don’t know how they’re going to take it, but I don’t think it’s going to be a problem.
“A lot of people (like Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds, who have both been MLB hitting coaches) have gotten back into the game and they haven’t had any problems with it. I was never suspended for (anabolic) steroids. I was mentioned in the (Mitchell) report, but I was never suspended (for anabolic steroids). Because of that, I wouldn’t accept anyone preventing me from working in baseball in the future. The most important thing is to focus on the positive and not the negatives, in the past.”
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He wants it to be with the A’s, though, teaching minor leaguers how to hit. That’s his first choice. Why?
“Because the A’s gave me my opportunity, and everyone I knew back then is still there,” he replies. “They’re practically family.”
Tejada says he has yet to reach out to the organization but plans to in the next few months. Before he does, he asks you to deliver a message.
“I want Oakland to know that I love them and that I’m looking forward to seeing them soon,” he says, and for a moment, you can hear a smile in his voice.
(Photo: Michael Zagaris / MLB Photos via Getty Images)
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