Miguel Tejada 33, not 31

If Ed Wade's face didn't turn red about Miguel Tejada's inclusion in the Mitchell Report, it might be crimson now. As it turns out Tejada is actually two years older than the Astros thought, despite his real age being on all of his legal documents. Outside of potentially overpaying for an even older shortstop the Astros don't lose too much. Tejada on the other hand is entering a possible free agent off-season, and those two years will likely cost him years and money.

The real question here is what research the Astros did concerning Tejada and whether the Orioles and even Billy Beane knew about it prior to trading/letting him walk., remember Beane chose to re-sign Eric Chavez over Tejada. Perhaps that played a small role? Of course I'd prefer to imagine the conversation between Andy MacPhail and Ed Wade when like this:

MacPhail: "Now Ed, before I fax over the papers I wanted to conceal two bits of information concerning Miguel."

Wade: "Look Andy, you know I'm a busy man. Mike Remlinger doesn't like to wait on return calls, so just fax the papers over. It's not like Miguel is 40 and on bull hormones."

And as Eric Simon said, there's only a 50% chance that conversation didn't occur.

For an idea of how the aging trend in baseball works check out Tom Tango's great work on the topic, here's a pretty graph which I'll use to imply how much Tejada's performance could drop:

via www.tangotiger.net