Miguel Tejada to the Houston Astros in Six-Player Deal

The Baltimore Orioles sent shortstop Miguel Tejada to the Houston Astros in exchange for 5 players. Tejada, the former AL MVP, is coming off his worse season since 2001, hitting .296/.357/.442 with 18 home runs good for a 109 OPS+*. 2007 also saw an end to Tejada’s consecutive games played streak, which ended at 1152, the longest active streak at the time, when he was hit by a pitch by San Diego reliever Doug Brocail, breaking his wrist and forcing Tejada onto the disabled list.

The broken wrist seemed to have healed as Tejada hit .283/.354/.465 with 11 home runs in his final 230 ABs after returning. This bodes well for the Astros who are counting on Tejada to be a major contributor to an offense that was 13/16 NL teams in runs scored with 723. He should benefit greatly from hitting into the Crawford Boxes at Minute Maid Park and see a rise in his power at home.

Tejada is also a decent defender at shortstop according to ESPN’s zone rating, which is a measurement of the percentage of balls caught in each respective positions defensive zone, where Tejada ranked second in the AL, higher than 2007 Gold Glove winner Orlando Cabrera. Tejada ranked seventh among major league shortstops.

This move doesn’t make too much sense for the Astros who have a weak farm system and lack a whole lot of talent on the roster beyond ace Roy Oswalt, 1B Lance Berkman, LF Carlos Lee and 2007 rookie, CF Hunter Pence. My understanding was they fired former general manager Tim Purpura in favor of Ed Wade in hopes of rebuilding the team, but Wade has other plans, “This is about ‘08…we’re putting a lot of emphasis on this coming season,” adding, “this isn’t a club to me that was in position to have to rebuild.”

I agree with Wade in that the team isn’t in a position to rebuild because they have no young talent on the way, however, this is a team that needs to rebuild so they can begin to bring in young talent.

The players being sent to the Orioles include OF Luke Scott, 3B Michael Costanzo, LHP Troy Patton and RHPs Matt Albers and Dennis Sarfate. Scott is a decent outfielder, but will be turning 30 in 2008. He once looked like a promising outfielder for Houston but he was gravely mishandled in the minor leagues, ala Jason Lane—the Astros have traditionally been piss-poor in developing talent in recent years. See Chris Burke. They also are giving up their number one prospect in Patton and number five prospect in Costanza, according to John Sickels Houston Astros Top-20 prospects list. Patton, the Astros 9^th round pick in 2004 and rates as a B+ prospect and Costanza, their 2^nd round pick in 2005 rates as a B- according to Sickels.

 

*For the less statistically-savv, OPS+ is a measure for a player’s overall offensive contribution based primarily on their on-base plus slugging percentage, OPS, that adjusts for the ballpark they play in and the league average. The scale is adjusted for 100 to represent an average offensive performance, anything higher is good, lower is bad.