Are the Red Sox going to trade Manny Ramirez to the Orioles for Miguel Tejada? Who knows? Maybe such a deal will have been completed by the time you read this; maybe it’s just a fever-dream of my fellow writers. I know that yesterday, at least one cab on 7th Avenue was reporting, by means of its bookie supported, roof-mounted sports ticker, that the trade was official. That turned out not to be true, but it may well be.

Such a trade would be completely insane for the Orioles. Manny Ramirez is one of the very best hitters in baseball history, as good as Mays, Aaron, DiMaggio, or Musial, better at his worst than Tejada is at his best – and he’s still a lesser player than the Baltimore shortstop. That’s not just because Tejada is a shortstop, nor because he’s an excellent hitter in his own right – it’s because Ramirez is, aside from his hitting (which isn’t what it once was), about as bad at every other facet of the game as it’s possible to be.

Ramirez possesses the foot speed of a three-legged dog with one leg caught in a bucket of dried cement, and exhibits a similar awareness of game situations and base running fundamentals. He is not only a left fielder, but possibly the worst in the majors, astonishingly bad by any measure. All this removes a big chunk of his value, especially when compared to Tejada. It’s easy to find a left fielder who hits reasonably well, next to impossible to find a shortstop who can do so, and Tejada is a fine defender who is, if not a top base stealer, at least a heady baserunner unlikely to run a team out of an inning.

But wait, there’s more! Tejada, the 2002 AL MVP, has missed four games in the last seven seasons, none in the last five; Ramirez is prone to taking off games in the middle of the season for no apparent reason. Tejada has a reputation as a team leader; Ramirez recently advised Johnny Damon to sign with the Yankees. Tejada will be 30 this coming season; Ramirez will be 34. Tejada makes about $12 million a year; Ramirez makes $20 million.

To my mind, no matter his virtues as a hitter, Ramirez has negative value. Were the Red Sox to offer him and cash to the Orioles for a B-grade prospect, it would be a fair offer, one worth mulling. The Red Sox have, instead, attached right-hander Matt Clement – a good enough pitcher, but one coming off a season in which his ERA was 4.57, and one due $19 million over the next two years – to the deal. Rather than sweetening the deal for the Orioles, this would seem to make it less attractive. They would be trading away Tejada for a left fielder unlikely to be significantly more valuable than Cliff Floyd over the life of the deal and a no. 3 starter, and would be taking on $22 million for the privilege.

That money could be spent more effectively by putting it toward a pitcher like Jeff Weaver – who’s likely to be as good as Clement – and hanging on to Tejada.

Why, aside from the obvious – Tejada has grumbled about a trade and is involved to some degree in the Rafael Palmeiro steroid embarrassment – would the Orioles even be mulling this trade? The obvious answer is that the team is run by yahoos. This is the franchise that just coughed up $12 million for Jeromy Burnitz, after all. One can come up with more complex explanations, but in baseball as in other fields, the simplest explanation is usually the most useful when one is seeking to explain that which makes no sense.

Less obviously, though, this trade wouldn’t make any sense for Boston, either, at least assuming they intend to compete this year. Tejada is better than Ramirez, but not so much better that swapping him into the Sox lineup at the cost of both Manny and Clement would compensate for the holes in the lineup, question marks on the pitching staff, and a generally odd distribution of talent. (The Sox currently have three third basemen and no shortstop, center fielder, or first baseman, though presumably one of the third basemen will be taking this last job.) The trade would likely save the Sox a fair bit of money, but at this late date there isn’t exactly a lot to spend that cash on.

In all, it’s a pretty daft trade for both sides, assuming of course that Boston hasn’t to some degree written off the season as a lost cause and begun looking forward to 2007, when some of their young talent will have developed and some of their bad contracts will be off the books. The New York fans most affected by it probably wouldn’t be Yankees fans, who will see two competitors weakened in different ways, but Mets boosters, who should be keeping their fingers crossed, knocking on lucky pieces of wood, and otherwise invoking whatever mojo they like in hopes that GM Omar Minaya won’t make some wacky trade for Ramirez, a deal that would make a lot less sense for the Mets than this one does for the Orioles, and a heck of a lot more sense for the Red Sox.

tmarchman@nysun.com