Over the last few years the idea of Miguel Tejada moving from shortstop to third base has come up on a number of different occasions. As Tejada gets older teams fear that the 34-year-old -- who turns 35 in May -- Tejada will start to lose some of his range at short, and would be better off at third where it's more about reaction time than range.The problem is that every time somebody's brought the idea up to Tejada, he's said no. Well, Miguel recently returned to Astros camp after the Dominican Republic was eliminated from the World Baseball Classic. He had been playing third base. It seems that Tejada may have discovered he liked playing third because now he's telling everybody he's totally cool with moving there if the team wants him to.
"Wherever they want me, I'll be there 100 percent," Tejada said. "If they want me to move to third, I'll do it. I just want to be here. I'm a free agent after this year, and the No. 1 thing for me is that I want to be here."Now the question here is whether or not Tejada is actually willing to move to third base, or if he just realizes that the Astros and Cecil Cooper have no desire to move him there because they don't have a shortstop capable of taking over. Meanwhile Aaron Boone and Geoff Blum seem set to platoon at third all season, and the organization does have Chris Johnson waiting in the wings. Johnson is hitting pretty well this spring with a slugging percentage of .550, while Boone and Blum have a slugging percentage of .247 when you add their respective percentages together (Boone's is .167 while Blum's is .080).
Maybe that's why Tejada is willing to move. Either way, I think that he should be working on a way to convince the powers that be to let him hit twice in the lineup.
