A+ Addition

Former Athletic Instantly Becomes Oriole Leader

Christmas Eve is a big day for Miguel Tejada and his family.

The entire Tejada clan, Miguel, his wife, Alesandra, his daughter and son, his father, his six sisters and five brothers, his nephews and nieces and great nephews and great nieces — almost three dozen people in all — gather at Miguel’s home in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, to celebrate the Christmas holiday.

The tables are filled with platters of pork and chicken, adorned with all the trimmings. Though Miguel was the last one born among the 12 Tejada siblings, he annually hosts his family’s Christmas Eve gala. He is the major league baseball player, after all, the one Tejada that has made it big in life. He enjoys his family. He takes pleasure in being the youngest and still being able to entertain and give support to his older brothers and sisters. He takes pleasure in hosting the steady stream of Tejadas who come to visit him while he is playing baseball in the United States, from the day spring training camp opens in February throughout the season.

Miguel loves being a family man.

“I’m the guy that takes care of everybody,” he says. “Now they make me feel like I’m the older one. I help take care of them financially. I like that, because god gave me the opportunity to do and have what I have right now. And I think he wants me to consider that I help my family, too.” And at the age of 28, just as serves as the de facto head of the entire Tejada clan, he now has another, new family to help nurture and support—the Baltimore Orioles.

And make no mistake about it, Tejada considers the Orioles to be family. And just as he is the paterfamilias of his family in the Dominican Republic, he is the new head man in the Orioles’ clubhouse and dugout. And like Frank Robinson four decades before him, Tejada leads the Orioles in two vital ways: with his bat and his sterling play on the field, and with his spirit, his will to win and with his effervescent personality.

Almost from the day he first stepped into the Orioles’ clubhouse in Ft. Lauderdale at the outset of spring training, it became abundantly clear that Tejada would be the epicenter of his new team.

Players gravitate around his locker. He is constantly laughing and bantering. His confidence rubs off on other players.

On the field, Tejada is perhaps the biggest cheerleader the Orioles ever have had. Just watch him when he gets on base, clapping and cajoling his teammates to excel. At shortstop he is never quiet, never still. Another fielder makes a nice play, and Tejada is there to congratulate him.

And then, of course, there’s his bat. Tejada doesn’t hit the ball, he crunches it. Throughout his seven-year big league career, April always has been the cruelest month for Tejada.

He doesn’t really warm up until the weather does. So the real Tejada is yet to make his presence felt in Baltimore. And the real Tejada is an awesome force at the plate.

“It’s something I don’t understand,” he says of his slow Aprils. “I can’t believe that I never start a season good. But I’m really happy that at least I do good the last part of the season.”

Of course, it would be difficult to describe Tejada’s performance this April as being bad, although he did leave quite a few runners on base. He batted .324 with two home runs and 14 RBIs. Prior to 2003, his April batting average was .242. He has his lowest home run and RBI totals of any month in April.

So if Tejada improves over this April’s numbers as much as he usually does, he’ll have an awesome season. Already, he is on his way to such a year. Through the first 13 games of May, the shortstop was hitting .380 with three home runs and 16 RBIs.

At those rare times when Tejada goes into a slump, he places a call down to the Dominican Republic and talks with Enrique Soto, who helps nurture young Dominican ballplayers for professional baseball at an academy he runs in Tejada’s native country. Actually, Tejada doesn’t need to be in a slump to talk with Soto. He calls him almost every day, seeking coaching and advice. “He watches my games every day on television,” Tejada says of Soto. “When I have a bad day at the plate, I call him the next day and ask him what I did wrong. And he’ll say, ‘You did this and this.’ He’s really helpful. And he’s been helping me my whole career. He’s a guy that’s known me for a long time.”

Tejada was the American League MVP in 2002, when he played with Oakland. That year he hit .308 with 34 home runs and 131 RBIs. Because he played in the small-media market of Oakland, Tejada never won all the hype and print and air time that have been heaped on other AL star shortstops like Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez and Nomar Garciappara. Yet he was such a force in leading Oakland to the American League West title that writers could not deny him the MVP award.

When Tejada was promoted to the big leagues for good by the Athletics in 1998, Oakland was a struggling team. It had finished last in the AL West three out of four years. Tejada helped turn them into one of the best teams in the league, though he clearly had a lot of assistance from others like Jason Giambi, Tim Hudson, Barry Zito, and Mark Mulder.

He left that club over the winter to sign as a free agent with the lowly Orioles — who have finished in fourth place for six consecutive seasonns — for $72 million over six years. Now Tejada believes he can help turn around his new team.

“I knew what had happened in Oakland,” he explains. “So when I came over here, I wasn’t really thinking about the past. I was thinking about what would happen from this year on. It’s not in my mind what this team has done before. Whatever’s going to come, it’s going to come from this year on. Now, everybody here feels like a winner. We’ll see where we are now. And we’re going to play hard.”

The sense that the Orioles can now become a winner is an idea that Tejada has tried to imbue in his teammates since he became an Oriole. In his heart, he feels the Orioles will follow the path to the postseason that he witnessed and was part of in Oakland.

“There’s some great pitching here,” he says. “And there are some great young players here, like [Brian] Roberts and [Larry] Bigbie and [Jay] Gibbons and [Luis] Matos. Those four guys are very good. And in Oakland, it was the same kind of thing. We just believed we could win together. And we had a young team at the time. We were players who believed if we all did the job and played together, we would win. And we made the playoffs before anybody expected we would.”

If the Orioles follow suit, it will in large part be because of Tejada’s presence on the team. He won’t be a man who sits still waiting for it to happen. Tejada is a man of perpetual motion. Even as the ball is in the pitcher’s hand between pitches, he is moving about at short, stretching, waving, eager for something to happen — and eageer for himself to be part of whatever it is that is happening.

“That’s me,” he says of his perpetual animation. “That’s just me. I’m a really happy guy. And if somebody from the team does something good, I feel really happy.”

The enthusiasm is not an act or a pose by Tejada. It’s part of his personality.

“I’ve always been that way,” he says. “I liked to be happy as a kid. I liked winning. I grew up feeling like I was a winner. I don’t like to lose.” He also knows that he has a magnetic personality.

“A lot of people like to play with me, because I’m always joking around a lot,” says Tejada. “I’m always laughing. I always smile. And I think everybody likes that.”

If Tejada has one special connection on the team, it is with third baseman Melvin Mora. The two play side-by-side on the Orioles’ infield and bat next to each other in the lineup. They also have spent most of the early season hitting the heck out of the ball, together swatting for averages that are at or near the top of the American League. They also are equally upbeat in their behavior and outlook.

“I’ve known Melvin for a long time,” Tejada says. “I enjoy playing with him. He’s the kind of guy who likes joking around, too. We have almost the same personality.”

During the offseason, Tejada returns to Dominican Republic. He enjoys nothing more than playing with his kids. In years past, he played winter ball. Not anymore, though. “I want to spend more time with my kids,” he explains.

He’ll also spend some time with his father and other older men playing a different kind of game that he enjoys: dominos.

“I play dominos a lot,” Tejada says. “I picked it up from my father. He likes to play. We often spend the day playing dominos together. I started playing not too long ago. I go into my old neighborhood, and I play with a lot of older people.”

How does the highly competitive baseball player who doesn’t like losing fare in the Dominican domino circuit?

“With dominos,” he says, “you never know. You win some, you lose some.”

Until his arrival in Baltimore this year, the Orioles had been doing more losing than winning. But with Miguel Tejada on the roster, that has a good chance of changing. He wants to give the team a winner again. And he already feels the fans have responded well to his initial efforts.

“It’s been wonderful for me in Baltimore,” the shortstop says. “I’d heard the fans in Baltimore were great, and now I know how good they are. They’ve been great to me. And I appreciate it.”