Brunt on Cabrera: A year for the ages

Batting average isn’t the full statistical measure of a hitter. Old habits and old numbers die hard, but anyone who pays attention to baseball ought to understand that by now.

Runs batted in are a reflection of opportunity as well as performance. Most of the time, someone else has to succeed first in order to make them happen, understanding of course that the guy at the plate still has to deliver.

We all got a little bit queasy celebrating gaudy home run totals in the wake of the PED era (that’s over now, right?… Right?).

So there’s your baseball Triple Crown.

And it is possible, in these final moments of the regular season to make the case that it is Angels’ super-rookie Mike Trout, and not the Detroit Tigers’ Miguel Cabrera, who is in fact the most valuable player in the American League.

But just this once, without arguing against the merits of more sophisticated analysis, leave us with this bit of lore, myth, nostalgia and let us celebrate for the first time in 45 years, a player poised to top those three traditional offensive categories in the same season.

That’s certainly enough of a drought to suggest that benchmark is crazy-difficult to achieve under any circumstances, to cast Cabrera’s accomplishment as more than a mere anomaly.

In the major sport that has the longest history in North America, and has changed over time less in its fundamentals than any of the others, there have been only thirteen Triple Crown winners since 1900, two of whom did it twice: Rogers Hornsby and Ted Williams.

The last, of course, was Carl Yastrzemski in 1967.

Look at the list and you won’t find any one hit wonders, any flukes or outliers (and if you look at the list of home runs champs or even MVP’s there are indeed a few of those). To a man, the Triple Crown winners of the 20th Century earned an invitation to Cooperstown — which would indicate that whatever its baseline statistical merits, you have to be a very special ballplayer to do it.

Which makes you wonder why Cabrera’s great campaign doesn’t seem to have registered with the wider sports public yet, why there hasn’t been much of a countdown, why the celebration even among the baseball hardcore seems strangely muted.

At age 29, ten years into his big league career, there’s still time for Cabrera to reach some of the statistical signposts that make Hall of Fame selection all but automatic, especially given that career arcs (even minus the fountain of youth provided by drugs) are different than they once were.

Compare him to Yaz, who had the advantage (at least in terms of hype) of playing for the then still-cursed Red Sox under the gaze of the East Coast baseball media. In his Triple Crown year, at age 28, he finished with 44 home runs, 24 more than his best previous high for a season, with 121 RBI’s, 41 above his career best (in part a reflection of the strengths of a pennant winning Red Sox side), and hitting .326, five points better than ever before.

Yastrzemski had a year nearly as good (with a better OPS) in 1970, and he was certainly both consistent and durable, playing on until 1983, finishing with 3419 hits, and entering the Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility with 94 per cent of the writers’ votes.

That’s not Miguel Cabrera yet, and that might not be Miguel Cabrera, ever. At the very least, he’d need to keep chugging along and stay healthy for another decade or so.

But in this moment, leading his league in average, home runs and runs batted in, he sure seems like a great player mislabeled as merely a very good player, enjoying a year for the ages that somehow has been lost in all of the background noise of this baseball season.

That’s an old fashioned way of looking at it. But old fashioned isn’t always the same thing as wrong.