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Hearing about Miguel Cabrera\u2019s closing in on 3,000 hits, my mind at first was a little surprised that he was at that stage of his career, seeing as how I still feel like it was yesterday that this spry thin third baseman for the then-Florida Marlins was showing off impressive power for his age.\u00a0 But when I actually put more than five minutes of thought behind it, I realize that it\u2019s really of no surprise at all that he\u2019s at this stage of his career, because basically there\u2019s never been any season where Miguel Cabrera has played where he has been an ineffective hitter.<\/span><\/p>\n Even way back, I always had pegged Miggy as a guy that would probably be an MVP-caliber guy, seeing as how he broke into the majors at like 20 years old.\u00a0 But the thing is, he showed up at a time where guys like Albert Pujols and Alex Rodriguez were the marquee hitters of MLB, and sluggers like Barry Bonds, Vladimir Guerrero and Frank Thomas were still around.\u00a0 It was easy for a guy like Miguel Cabrera to kind of get lost in the shuffle.<\/span><\/p>\n But nearly 20 years later, most of those guys are gone, be it through retirement, collusion, age, degradation of skills or any combination of the above.\u00a0 Albert Pujols is the only guy still active, and he\u2019s at the twilight of his career where he\u2019s doing his farewell tour for the team that brought him into the world, after a pretty unimpressive contract with the Angels.<\/span><\/p>\n And Miguel Cabrera is still around; although age is catching up to him, taking some power away, he\u2019s still hitting the ball for a decent average in a period of the game where batting averages are bordering on historically bad.\u00a0 Honestly, my knee-jerk thoughts were wondering on where Cabrera stood on possibly being the greatest of all-time, or just the best player for a generation, but clearly I\u2019ve been not paying enough attention to the numbers or the game in general, and upon a closer examination, the last few years haven\u2019t been as kind to him as I thought they might have been.<\/span><\/p>\n All the same, I felt like writing some words in appreciation of Miguel Cabrera.\u00a0 Father Time might have grabbed him by the scruff five years ago, but up to that point, the guy was probably on track to be as good as Hank Aaron from a consistently great standpoint.\u00a0 And I think it\u2019s still safe to put Miggy on the pedestal of possibly being the greatest player of his generation, because when you look at his personal accomplishments throughout his career, there\u2019s only some really snug and exclusive company in numerous categories: Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, and Albert Pujols.<\/span><\/p>\n But when you factor in the fact that Miguel Cabrera has hit for the triple-crown (traditional and<\/em> the geeky sabermetric) on top of everything else, that literally puts him in a category of his own; Triple-crown winner, MVP, 3,000 hits and 500 home runs.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Statisticians tend to poorly favor those who decline quickly, like Cabrera has been over the last five years, which will likely take him out of the<\/em> GOAT debates, but there\u2019s no mistaking that with his body of work and all his achievements throughout his career, Miggy\u2019s name definitely deserves to be mentioned frequently as one of the GOATs.\u00a0 It\u2019s just hard to imagine that in a game rich with history and numbers, that my generation would be one to have been able to witness and watch one of them rise, thrive and produce throughout his career.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Hearing about Miguel Cabrera\u2019s closing in on 3,000 hits, my mind at first was a little surprised that he was at that stage of his career, seeing as how I still feel like it was yesterday that this spry thin third baseman for the then-Florida Marlins was showing off impressive power for his age.\u00a0 But … Continue reading In praise of Miguel Cabrera\u2019s quietly good career<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[62,100,76,83,99],"class_list":["post-48738","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brog","tag-baseball","tag-comparison","tag-geeks","tag-observations","tag-reminiscing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48738","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=48738"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48738\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48740,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48738\/revisions\/48740"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=48738"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=48738"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=48738"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}