Bobbert wrote: ↑Sun Oct 01, 2023 10:14 amI have to admit that I'm feeling very happy today that it's finally the last day of Miguel Cabrera's player contract with the Tigers. Many people have been waiting for this day for years.
I won't try to take anything away from the people who are celebrating the end of Cabrera's career for other reasons. But it will be so wonderful to get his excessively long, very expensive, and often very wasteful contract off the books and spend that money on something more productive.
This, largely, has been the crux of my conflicted fandom of the Tigers during Cabrera's career. Terrific regular-season player who disappeared in the playoffs. I also had a big problem that Miggy was someone who liked the "just-a-big-kid" act a little too much, loved being in the center of the celebrations when the team did well, but hid in the trainer's room and and hid behind his language barrier when the going got tough. I have an expectation (maybe unreasonable nowadays) that the highest-paid player also should be the team's locker-room spokesperson, in good times and bad, and Cabrera never was that.MWmetalhead wrote: ↑Mon Oct 02, 2023 4:23 pmNot only could he have fouled off that 2-2 pitch in the 10th, he should've nailed it for a line drive.
I was never as emotionally connected to Cabrera as, say, Kaline, Trammell, Whitaker, etc. since Cabrera was a trade acquisition and not a home-grown player. If it had been up to me, I would have dumped Cabrera to the highest bidder after 2016. His and the team's decline started then, and I would have done whatever it took to send him somewhere where he could chase another ring. A smart GM would have done that, but neither Dave Dombrowski nor Al Avila had the chutzpah to convince Mike Ilitch to move on.
I sometimes wonder if the real reason why Dombrowski was let go in 2015, was because he realized Cabrera would soon begin diminishing as a player and wanted to get rid of him while he could get something of value, and was prevented by Mike Ilitch. Cabrera's stats tailed off significantly after the 2016 season, and by 2017 nobody would have traded a bag of broken bats for Miggy.
