The World Baseball Classic Could Be Miguel Cabrera’s Swan Song

It always ends up like this. Sports legends — or, heck, legends of any craft — move past their prime and arrive at the “I guess I’m still here” zone. Sometimes it’s abrupt, while sometimes it’s more of a snail’s pace. Future Hall of Famer Miguel Cabrera mostly falls in the latter category. And it’s one reason why this year’s World Baseball Classic is particularly important.

Cabrera — or as the cool kids call him, “Miggy” — has already confirmed that the 2023 campaign will be his last, which in a lot of ways is quite depressing. Not because he’s fallen to anemic levels of production, or that he’s calling it quits early, but because the announcement is a reminder of how little we actually got to talk about him over the last few years.

Mainly, that can be attributed to the atrocious ineptitude of the Detroit Tigers, who have managed to go through a rebuild so long that the sequel to Avatar finally came out.

Now, Cabrera isn’t the only baseball player, and certainly not the only athlete, to be stranded on such an island of mediocrity. But unlike, say, Mike Trout — who may be this generation’s Dan Marino if things keep going accordingly — the last several years have barely given us anything to even talk about with Cabrera. For many, his name might’ve only been brought up in those “wow, it’s so weird seeing Miguel Cabrera on the waiver wire” types of fantasy baseball conversations.

And that really darn stinks. It stinks a whole damn lot. Cabrera was perhaps the face of baseball for that brief period before the aforementioned Trout took a blowtorch to the rest of the league. Even my friends that couldn’t tell you what a balk means still knew who Cabrera was.

He had an aura about him. Perhaps it was his swing, which is the second result you’ll see pop up in the YouTube search bar after typing his name. Maybe his objectively cool Miggy nickname. If you’re a chaos enthusiast, maybe his insane brawl against the Yankees. Or maybe even his early days as a Florida Marlin — which serve as yet another reminder that the team that trades away their superstar player…pause for dramatic effect…often loses the trade.

By now, you may have noticed that I haven’t brought up many stats to help contextualize Cabrera’s greatness. It’s not because I’m being a bad writer (I think?), or that I’m simply in an ongoing war with math (I also think?), but rather because Cabrera, from my perspective, has always been about storytelling and mythmaking. I could tell you about his fWAR total or legendary triple-crown season. I could talk about him being one of the few players to reach the 3000-hit club, using it as a springboard to pontificate about how little fanfare it received compared to Derek Jeter — an easy target for baseball fans everywhere.

But for me, it’s all about the stories.

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The at-bat that started a Hall Of Fame career. New podcast episode out now and on YouTube #marlins #tigers #baseball #fypシ

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The intrigue around Miguel Cabrera’s final season hardly has anything to do with the Tigers. They’re terrible, and even in a lousy AL Central division, it’s highly unlikely they’ll make even the tiniest of splashes in the pennant race.

Instead, we have to hope that this year’s World Baseball Classic will give us one last story to tell. Team Venezuela has been picking up steam as a sleeper, and the possibility of Cabrera getting meaningful, high-stakes at-bats one last time makes the whole tournament worthwhile.