Miguel Cabrera is pissed. It’s the bottom of the ninth at Yankee Stadium on one of those cold October nights that you can feel in the leather of your baseball glove. Tigers closer Jose Valverde just entered the game to try to write the final paragraph of an easy 4–0 victory in game one of the American League Championship Series. The game seems so in hand that thousands of fans are already gone, streaming towards 161st Street station and the 4 train that will carry them out of the Bronx. What those fans don’t see is Valverde giving up a pair of two-run homers to tie the game. What even those fans still at the game don’t see is Cabrera—the undisputed Tigers captain, if baseball had captains—screaming at his manager, Jim Leyland, for leaving Valverde in the game as he served up fastball after fastball down the heart of the plate. Cabrera paced, glared in Leyland’s direction and punched a water cooler. Just the Detroit Tigers leader, best player and face of the franchise showing up his 67-year-old manager and generally behaving like a spoiled child. As unpredictable as always.
That’s Miguel Cabrera—one side of him, at least. It’s hard to find a baseball player with so many faces. Few on the Tigers are as passionate, and none can be as intense and unabashedly emotional when consumed by the exhausting highs and lows of baseball. But few are also as easygoing and subdued as the 29-year-old slugger, who often loafs around the clubhouse before a big game like he hasn’t a care in the world. Maybe no one in the majors makes hitting baseballs look as easy—Cabrera has posted a batting average of .320 or higher in seven of the past eight seasons and became just the 14th player in MLB history to reach 300 home runs before his 30th birthday. But there also might be no one in the majors who makes life look so hard away from the field, where Cabrera has had multiple run-ins with the law and publicly battled alcoholism. Cabrera has worn all those masks during his first 10 seasons in the majors, and, for the most part, the Tigers have been happy to accept him, warts and all. Now, on the verge of 30 and being counted on to be the Tigers’ unequivocal leader on their second deep playoff run in as many years, everyone is waiting to see if he can keep it all together.
growing up In the Venezuelan city of Maracay—known as Ciudad Jardin (Garden City) for the lush rainforest that hugs it to the north—Cabrera lived right beside the park where he played ball every afternoon. He would come home from school, drop off his book bag, pick up his glove, climb over his backyard fence and land on the field. He was a fleet-footed shortstop at the time—hard to believe when you see the six-foot-four, 240-pounder today—and he quickly put his name on the map as one of the best young players in Venezuela, if not the world. By the time he was 14, professional scouts were at his games, trying to get in on the ground floor of Latin America’s next big thing. Al Avila was in charge of amateur scouting and international operations for the Florida Marlins at the time. He sent two scouts to make inroads with Cabrera and his family in Venezuela before Avila himself began paying regular visits to Maracay in September 1998. The trio got to know Cabrera’s mother, Gregoria, and father, Miguel, and promised them that if their boy joined the Marlins, the team would honour their wishes and let him stay in Venezuela an extra year so he could finish high school. This was all more than a year before Cabrera was even eligible to sign with a major league team. “I can’t tell you we thought he was going to be a Triple Crown winner,” the talkative Avila says. “But we all felt he had tremendous potential.”
The Marlins offered Cabrera a contract for $1.8 million, a record for an amateur international free agent. Cabrera weighed his options—several other teams had expressed interest and the Dodgers had offered more money—but ended up signing with the Marlins, not only because they were investing heavily in other Latin players, but because of how Avila and company treated his family. “It was the relationship that we built, that trust,” Avila says. “He came from a very close-knit family. It was extremely important to him.”
The Marlins were so impressed with Cabrera that they brought him to Sun Life Stadium to work out with the big-league club as a 16-year-old. Cabrera took batting practice and ran infield drills with major leaguers who had 10 years on him. And he held his own. “When he swung the bat, I mean…” Avila says, shaking his head in amusement. “It was almost exactly the same as the way he swings the bat today. He was that good.”
If you have seen Cabrera take his cuts today, you know that statement is impressive. Cabrera’s batting practice sessions are an air show—he lifts ball after ball deep into the bleachers as fans scramble to gather up a piece of his work. The most astounding moments are when he starts going to the opposite field, smacking hits that seem to come off his bat straight and then curve impossibly like boomerangs towards the outfield seats in right field. It’s rare, even in batting practice, to see that kind of opposite-field power, but Cabrera carries it over to the game. He hit 12 of his 44 home runs this year to right field, including three that travelled more than 400 feet. His 205 hits this season were the picture of symmetry: 47 to each side of the diamond with the remaining 111 going straight up the middle. Ballplayers can spend entire careers trying to figure out how to hit the other way with power. Cabrera steps up and puts it anywhere he wants. “I’ve never seen anybody hit the ball to the opposite field like him in 49 years of baseball, and I doubt anyone else has,” Leyland says. “They might say they have, but they haven’t.”
On Friday, Oct. 2, 2009, after going 0-for-4 in an 8–0 loss to the Chicago White Sox in the decisive final days of a division race, Cabrera went to the Townsend Hotel bar in Birmingham, Mich.—an affluent suburb of Detroit where he lives with his wife, Rosangel—and drank himself silly. He arrived home in the early hours of the morning and got into a dispute with Rosangel that became physical. Rosangel called the police, who arrived around
6 a.m. to find a “very uncooperative and highly intoxicated” Cabrera (his blood alcohol level was 0.26) with scratches on the side of his face. The police did not arrest Cabrera, but they did take him to the station, where Tigers president and GM Dave Dombrowski picked him up. After all, Cabrera had a game that night.
The incident was a very public, very embarrassing illustration of what many in the Tigers clubhouse and around the game already knew—Cabrera had a drinking problem. A few days later, a report emerged that Cabrera had had another run-in with the police at the same bar about a month earlier, in which he threatened several patrons. Then, in February 2011, he was arrested in Florida and charged with driving under the influence. According to a police report, Cabrera defiantly drank from a bottle of Buchanan’s scotch whisky in front of the arresting officers. He smiled broadly in his mug shot.
Anyone who has seen Cabrera before a game would recognize that smile. When he’s taking batting-practice swings, fielding ground balls or bantering with fans, Cabrera is always grinning. But away from his work he has struggled with personal issues. There was a time when those problems bled into Cabrera’s baseball life, and he was criticized by coaches and teammates for being unfocused and disinterested. His good days were fine, but on his bad days you couldn’t talk to the guy. The Marlins traded Cabrera to the Tigers in December of 2007—an eight-player deal that, in hindsight, was comically lopsided in Detroit’s favour—because they didn’t think they could afford him. But they were also concerned about Cabrera’s personal life. Even if they could pay his price, they just didn’t see the troubled slugger as a safe investment.
The Tigers did, signing Cabrera to an eight-year, $185.3-million contract extension shortly after the trade, betting franchise-record money that he could get his life under control. Cabrera took part in a three-month alcohol-abuse treatment program in January 2010, which seemed to put him on the right path until the Florida arrest in early 2011. He eventually pled no contest to those charges and received a year of probation. Since then, Cabrera appears to once again have his drinking under control, though alcoholism is a lifelong battle. When the Tigers clinched the AL Central this year, out of respect for their teammate, they celebrated by spraying each other with non-alcoholic champagne. Cabrera took things a step further and excused himself from the festivities. “He’s a lot more mature today. He cares about his teammates, he cares about his family,” Avila says of the father of three. “He’s as focused as I’ve ever seen him in my life.”
It’s 8 p.m., more than 30 minutes after the Tigers took a 2–0 lead in the ALCS with a shutout over the Yankees, and the Detroit Tigers’ leader, their best player, the face of the franchise, is nowhere to be found. Cabrera is hiding, hanging out in the shower area waiting for the media to clear out so he can change in peace. But the baseball press is a plucky bunch, so several of them are still waiting for Cabrera, including a handful from Latin outlets, when he emerges from the showers with a yellow towel around his waist and another draped over his broad shoulders. He quickly gets dressed and gives a few terse interviews in Spanish before reluctantly speaking to the English reporters. The Tigers just beat the team with the AL’s best record, twice, in Yankee Stadium, and seized every ounce of momentum in this pennant-deciding series. Cabrera has no reason to duck the press. But after just five minutes of clichés—he says “We need to get some wins” four times, as if he doesn’t realize that’s what the Tigers have been doing—Cabrera calls off the scrum. “OK, that’s it,” he says, muffling a reporter as he starts his next question. “We’re done.”
Cabrera, for better or worse, is the shy superstar who ducks out of the limelight and closes up when the television cameras flicker on. He’s the best hitter in the game, but you won’t see him selling razor blades or anti-dandruff shampoo. If he wanted to, he could be baseball’s biggest star. But the last thing he wants is for anyone to even know he exists. Cabrera’s name was in every newspaper the world over this year when he became the first ballplayer in 45 years to lead his league in batting average, home runs and runs batted in. He hated it. “It was hard to focus,” the Triple Crown winner says. “It gets frustrating.”
So he’s the guy who mugs for photos with fans before games but can’t stand the cameras afterwards. It’s just another contradiction to add to a substantial list. Whether he’s yelling at his manager, being aloof in the clubhouse or making a game as difficult as baseball look effortless, you never know what you’re going to get with Miguel Cabrera. He’ll take things too seriously one moment and not seriously enough the next. Maybe that’s why he’s so interesting. Who would want to be predictable?
This article originally appeared in Sportsnet Magazine.