When the Houston Astros traded five players for shortstop Miguel Tejada in December, it was at best a fit of pointlessness and at worst an epic botch. Houston, after all, lost 89 games in a weak division last year, has little pitching past ace Roy Oswalt, and balances out some interesting young positional talent with decrepit utility infielders and left fielder Carlos Lee, a decent player who’s also one of the more overpaid in the sport.

If ever there was a clear case of a team buying when it should have been selling, this was it. Bad went to worse when Tejada was named as a likely drug user in Senator Mitchell’s infamous report, issued the very day after the trade. Yesterday, worse went to worst as the Houston Chronicle reported that Tejada is, as has long been rumored, actually 33, rather than 31.

“I’m a poor kid that wanted to be a professional big leaguer,” Tejada told the paper in explaining why he had allowed the Oakland Athletics to labor under the misapprehension that he was 17 when he signed in 1993. “I was thinking that was the only way that I could help my family.”

No one should mistake this for any great unburdening of conscience. After the news initially broke, ESPN reported that all of this was prompted by an interview in which they’d presented Tejada with a birth certificate demonstrating his true age and asked whether it was accurate. He said it probably was, and then walked out of the interview, in which he’d earlier claimed to be neither 31 nor 33, but 32.

More importantly, though, no one should get the vapors over this. No great villainy seems to have gone on. As Tejada explained things, a scout advised him to lie about his age so that he could play in an intensely watched Dominican summer league that doesn’t allow players over 17 to take the field. Doubtless he was competing against many other wizened old men with beards and families pretending to be teenagers, and, as noted in the Chronicle report, his green card and other documentation all reflects his correct birth date.

The idea that anyone was rooked here is absurd. There was a Wild West mentality in the Dominican Republic in the 1990s, with players and teams constantly looking for ways to cheat the system. The Atlanta Braves and Los Angeles Dodgers, for instance, were fined and forced to temporarily suspend their scouting operations a decade ago because they signed players younger than 16. (Adrian Beltre was, I believe, still nursing when he signed his first contract.)

Houston fans — and, for that matter, fans of the Baltimore Orioles, who signed Tejada to a six-year, $72 million contract — might have some cause for complaint, but any indignant outrage should be directed at their teams’ management, which has likely been lying to them. To believe that these teams weren’t aware of the truth isn’t just to believe that they made enormous investments in Tejada without paying any attention to widespread rumors about his age, but to believe that they didn’t bother to look at any of his paperwork. This is pretty hard to believe.

After all, although it never made an enormous impression on the baseball-watching public, this is really one of the last reverberations of a 6-year-old scandal. When visa requirements were tightened after the attacks of September 11, 2001, a shocking number of players — more than 300, by Baseball America’s count — were suddenly disclosed to be older than they claimed. Two different Oakland prospects were shown to be a full five years older than was supposed, and several players turned out to be skulking about with entirely phony identities filched from other people. Angel Abreu, for instance, turned out to really be Rafaelito Garcia, and Danilo Contreras was actually one Emilio Ferreira.

Tejada’s case isn’t the first time a big star has turned out to be two years older than previously thought. In 2003, Alfonso Soriano confessed to the Yankees that he was 28, not 26. The Yankees let the Texas Rangers in on the poorly kept secret when they traded Soriano in 2004, though no one bothered to tell the wider world until that summer, enraging fantasy baseball players by the thousands.

While Houston general manager Ed Wade claimed yesterday that all of this came as a surprise to him, inanely stressing that Tejada “plays like he’s 25,” the explanation that makes the most sense is that something similar went on here, that what was privately known has been made public because of ESPN’s reporting, and that Wade is feigning shock because he doesn’t want to look bad for having traded for a soon-to-be-34-year-old shortstop for his lousy club. It’s worth cracking a grin over the suddenly ancient Tejada’s long charade, and over the possibility that long-standing rumors about other players (a St. Louis Cardinals first baseman, say) might end up being true after all. A grin is more or less what it’s worth, though. The funniest thing about the whole thing is still that Wade thought his team could contend.

tmarchman@nysun.com