Cabrera’s epic career, as told by pitchers who gave up his 3,000 hits
Tigers legend Miguel Cabrera entered Game 1 of an April 23 doubleheader having stepped into the batter’s box 11,038 times across his 20-year MLB career. His first plate appearance that day resulted in his 3,000th career hit against the Colorado Rockies at Comerica Park.
Cabrera is the 33rd player in MLB history to accomplish 3,000 hits and one of seven players with at least 500 home runs and 3,000 hits, joining Albert Pujols, Alex Rodriguez, Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, Eddie Murray and Rafael Palmeiro. There’s an even rarer club within that one that’s well within reach: Only Aaron and Pujols also have 600 doubles, with Cabrera at 599 at press time.
It’s just the latest milestone for the 39year-old with a Hall of Fame résumé, and another symbol of his standing among both active major leaguers and the historic greats of the game.
No one knows Cabrera’s greatness better than the pitchers who have surrendered the lion’s share of those hits. Cabrera completed the chase for 3,000 with at least one hit off of 997 pitchers, including a surplus of All-Stars and eight who have already been inducted into the Hall of Fame.
The Detroit Free Press spoke with several as they recounted Cabrera’s journey to 3,000 hits and shared insight into what has made him one of the most feared – and beloved – hitters of his generation.
‘I knew he was going to put up big numbers’
The Marlins signed Cabrera, from the La Pedrera neighborhood in Maracay, Venezuela, for a $1.8 million bonus in July 1999. Cabrera rapidly ascended through the minor leagues, peaking with 69 games with the Double-A Carolina Mudcats to open the 2003 season. Called up from the Mudcats to the majors, he made his MLB debut in June 2003 and never looked back. As a rookie, Cabrera hit an opposite-field home run off New York Yankees starter Roger Clemens in Game 4 of the World Series, and the Marlins won the Series in six games. The next year, he made his first AllStar Game, crushed 33 home runs and finished 22nd in National League MVP voting. Cabrera then posted back-to-back topfive MVP performances in 2005 and 2006.
Cabrera mashed for the Marlins until December 2007, when the Tigers acquired him in a trade. In exchange for Cabrera and left-hander Dontrelle Willis, the Tigers gave up a sextet of prospects: outfielder Cameron Maybin, left-hander Andrew Miller, catcher Mike Rabelo, and righthanders Eulogio De La Cruz, Dallas Trahern and Burke Badenhop. Cabrera is in his 15th season with the Tigers; Maybin and Miller were the last of the six prospects to retire, calling it quits during the 2021-22 offseason.
Tom Glavine, 47 plate appearances (2003-07): “You look at a lineup and try to identify guys that you don’t want to let beat you, but at the same time, you look forward to those confrontations. The best brings out the best in the other best players. It’s those individual interactions as much as it’s a team game. That’s fun. I know he’s going to get me sometimes, and I’m going to get him sometimes. That’s the cat and mouse game. I could see with him, he had a respect for the battle.”
Cole Hamels, 28 plate appearances (2006-17): “When I made it to the big leagues and I saw him, he was probably one of the most intimidating human beings I ever saw. And he’s only a year older than me. Being in big-league camp at 20 years old, and I go, ‘This guy’s only 21?’ It blew my mind. I knew he was going to be really good. You just don’t know how long of a period of time he’s going to last. I knew he was going to put up big numbers. He was always going to hit .300. He was always going to have 25-plus homers.”
‘Miggy didn’t have a lot of holes’
If you can judge a hitter by his greatest nemeses, Cabrera gets high marks indeed. There’s Glavine, who lasted 22 MLB seasons (1987-2008) and was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2014. The longtime Atlanta Brave was a two-time NL Cy Young winner, 10-time All-Star, 1995 World Series champion and 1995 World Series MVP.
James Shields, meanwhile – who has more of Cabrera’s plate appearances than any other pitcher – was an All-Star and made 405 starts across his 13-year MLB career (2006-18), many in the AL Central with the White Sox and Royals.
Jeremy Guthrie, a 2002 first-round draft pick, stuck around for 13 major league seasons (2004-15, 2017), dueling the Tigers while with the Royals for five sea
sons during Cabrera’s peak.
Hamels, a four-time All-Star, pitched 15 years (2006-20) and mostly faced Cabrera during the slugger’s early years, while the two were in the NL East with Philadelphia and Florida. Hamels led the Phillies to the 2008 World Series title while winning both NLCS MVP and World Series MVP.
Zack Greinke returned to the Royals in 2022 for a second stint in his 19th MLB season. The six-time All-Star – also a six-time Gold Glove winner and two-time Silver Slugger – won the American League Cy Young in 2009; that season he held Cabrera to two hits in 14 at-bats. Cabrera is a .346 hitter against him in all other seasons. Corey Kluber, still active as part of his 12-year career, is a two-time AL Cy Young winner and three-time All-Star. Chris Sale, also still active but on the 60day injured list with the Red Sox, has pitched 12 seasons in the big leagues, including seven in the AL Central with the White Sox. A seven-time All-Star, Sale won
the 2018 World Series with the Red Sox. Trevor Bauer – who spent parts of seven seasons facing Cabrera while with Cleveland – was an All-Star in 2018, earned the 2020 NL Cy Young and has pitched 10 years.
James Shields, 79 plate appearances (2006-18): “He’s one of the best hitters in the game that I faced. I don’t think anybody can really argue with that. He was such a disciplined hitter. His plate coverage was incredible. A lot of guys, they’re really good hitters, but they can only cover half the plate, so if you execute your pitch, you can get him out because there are holes. Miggy didn’t have a lot of holes. And when we did expose holes, he immediately knew from at-bat to at-bat how to fix that. He knows what he can’t hit, but at the end of the day, he’ll just foul it off and move on to the next one.
“I tried to get ground balls as much as I possibly could, but he was so good at finding the holes. His approach at the plate was completely different every single at-bat. It was very difficult. He’s one of the smartest hitters in the game. He studied pitchers like no other hitter. He knew what everybody was throwing. Between him and Manny Ramirez, those are the two top guys for me that knew pitchers better than anybody.”
Zack Greinke, 42 plate appearances (2007-22): “The way I remember it is he was like the most complete hitter, but he did have a little issue up and away. He wouldn’t swing and miss, but he would foul it off. He would hit a line-drive foul. I tried to do that a lot. It was tough to get him to swing and miss there, but you could get a couple strikes there. That was about the only spot he had an opening, and that was only if you threw hard. If you threw slower, it wouldn’t matter.”
Hamels: “I always wanted to keep the ball close to him – less damage with him not getting his hands out there and using his strength. That kind of helped me, but then again, he would find ways to get hits. There were points during games where I’d say, ‘I’m just going to let him get a single and try to get the next guy out.’ He’s not going to be stealing second. He’s not going first-to-third. I had to give into him and try to get the other guys out.”
Chris Sale, 66 plate appearances (2010-19): “When he locks it in, when he’s going, there’s nothing anyone can do. You can throw the perfect pitch, he’ll get to it. He just had days where he didn’t get out. It didn’t matter who was out there. Take any pitcher in their prime on their best day, Miggy’s winning that battle.”
‘Hundreds and thousands of players ... felt like he was their friend’
Cabrera hit .380 (27-for-71) with four home runs, seven walks and 12 strikeouts in 79 plate appearances against Shields. He hit .362 (25-for-69) with six homers, four walks and 15 strikeouts in 73 plate appearances against Corey Kluber. He hit .291 (16-for-55) with four homers, 11 walks and 18 strikeouts in 66 plate appearances against Sale. And he hit .328 (19-for-58) with four homers, six walks and eight strikeouts in 65 plate appearances against Jeremy Guthrie. He has faced those four pitchers more than anyone else. Cabrera also hit .340 (16-for-47) vs. José Quintana, .286 (12-for-42) vs. Trevor Bauer, .262 (11for-42) vs. Brett Myers, .300 (12-for-40) vs. Glavine, .325 (13-for-40) vs. Greinke, .367 (11-for-30) vs. Michael Pineda and .579 (11for-19) vs. Hamels.
Even with that dominance at the plate, opposing pitches from around the league have spent two decades palling around with him – when they didn’t have to face him.
Glavine: “Sometimes where maybe I got him out, maybe I struck him out on a pitch that either he got fooled by or he knew was coming and still missed, he would look at you and give you that grin. I can promise you there were times where the reverse was true. When you get those, those are fun.”
Hamels: “I was able to get him out a few times, and he would look at me like, Oh, you got me. I enjoyed it. It can be very exhausting during the season, and there’s just those points where you feel free and start to feel like a kid again. That happened in those moments when you would play against him. In those moments, you were back to backyard baseball or Little League.”
Pineda, 33 plate appearances (201121): “Some guys take the game so serious. OK, that’s your personality, I’m fine. When I see guys like Miggy, they make me happy. I say, ‘Wow, I want to stay here forever. I know it’s impossible, but I want to stay here forever.’ He enjoyed the moment. The numbers are important, but the personality he has, everybody loves him. Everybody loves Miggy. Everybody loves facing him, because they want to enjoy the moment.”
Quintana, 55 plate appearances (2012-21): “The first time I faced him, I got two strikeouts against him and won that game. The day after he was playing third (base), he kept looking at me in the dugout. He said to me, ‘Hey, really good job yesterday. Really good pitches.’ That was my first year in the big leagues. It was special to get respect from him. It gave me confidence.”
Myers, 47 plate appearances (200307): “I enjoyed watching him to do that. The game has changed a lot. When I was coming up, it was just coming out of that tough guy era. I modeled my game after the tough guys: Bob Gibson, Nolan Ryan and Roger Clemens. That’s the era I grew up learning the game. To see him having fun out there, you can point your kids in that direction.”
Sale: “There was an instance where I was told to walk him intentionally, and I almost came up out of my cleats. The game was in Chicago. They wanted me to walk him to get to Prince Fielder, and I told my pitching coach, ‘If you ever have me intentionally walk somebody again, I’m walking off the mound.’ I hated it. I knew he knew. He looked at me like, You little wuss. I felt the same way. I was like, ‘Man, this is a moment.’ I always loved facing him. That’s what we’re here for – the big matchups.”
Bauer, 53 plate appearances (201420): “When I’d beat him with a pitch, he would nod and smile. We would shift him
sometimes to the pull side, and then he would hit a fastball up and in, and it may or may not make it to the outfield grass, but he just kind of bunted the other way. He literally would point at the ball and laugh at it when he was running down the line like, Haha, that’s going to be a hit. Fun all-around playing against him.”
Guthrie, 65 plate appearances (2008-15): “You’re going to have hundreds and thousands of players be able to tell a story about how they played with or against Miguel Cabrera, and they felt like he was their friend, like he was someone that was willing to teach them in certain moments, encourage them in other moments and make the smile in other moments. We can run off a list of many Hall of Fame players that probably never gave anyone the time of day and were very focused on their craft. No one’s going to have those stories about other guys like they will about Miguel Cabrera. His character and personality create even more of an appreciation for who he is and what he’s accomplished.”
‘It elevated his legacy’
Leading up to the 2012 season, Cabrera had finished in the top five in MVP voting five times, including runner-up in 2010. But in 2012, he went on a tear, winning the first Triple Crown since 1967 (Carl Yastrzemski) by hitting an MLB-best .330 with 44 home runs and an AL-best 139 RBI. Cabrera won the 2012 AL MVP, then went back-to-back, securing the 2013 MVP. That year, he hit .348 with 44 homers and 137 RBI. His totals for both seasons: .338 with 88 home runs, 276 RBI, 156 walks and 192 strikeouts in 309 games.
No player since has won consecutive MVP awards.
Shields: “Any player that tells you they weren’t following it, they are lying. Everyone was following it. It’s a moment in history. I was pulling for him. I don’t think there’s one baseball guy that really wasn’t pulling for him.”
Sale: “I found myself pulling for him because I have respect for him. I have respect for him as a ballplayer, as a competitor. When I’m facing him, I want him to suck. But I respect who he is, what he does and how he does it enough to know that this is historic, he’s earned it, he deserves it, and I’d love to see him get it. That type of thing. Just not against me.”
Quintana: “We were waiting for when he started to get cold. But he was always hot that year. Those were really tough atbats, especially when you’re going to face Victor Martinez after him. We didn’t have room to make mistakes. As a Latin guy, he’s the best hitter I have ever seen.”
Kluber, 73 plate appearances (201121): “I think he’s still a very dangerous hitter. He’s still a guy that impacts other guys in their lineup. The guys that have experience facing him, I would imagine nobody’s any more comfortable. The same presence is still there.”
Hamels: “You want him to be able to win another World Series. He did it so young, he probably didn’t know what he was doing. When you win these personal awards, you look at Miguel and know he would like to do something as a team and he would like to win that championship because that’s almost more fulfilling. But at the same time, the guy’s a Hall of Famer. He’ll forever be remembered as one of the best players to play the game.”
‘Everybody is going to remember his career’
In August 2021, Cabrera became the 28th player in MLB history to reach 500 home runs. Seven months later, he became the 33rd player to achieve 3,000 hits. Seven players have accomplished both milestones: Cabrera, Aaron, Mays, Murray, Palmeiro, Pujols and Rodriguez. Only two of those players – Aaron and Pujols – also boast 600 doubles. Cabrera has 599 doubles, to go with the highest batting average of the three: .310 for his 2,600-game career.
Glavine: “If I had a runner on second base in a tie game, I didn’t want to see Tony Gwynn. That is probably my standard answer there. Now that I think about it, I would say Miguel is 100% in the top five in terms of right-handed hitters that I faced. I say that with all due respect because I’d have to think about who the other four guys would be in the same discussion.”
Greinke: “I played against him in his prime a lot of the times I faced him. He was the most complete right-handed hitter I’ve faced. People that you could compare to him, I didn’t face them as consistently in their prime. I’m not saying he’s better, but when I faced him, he was the best.”
Pineda: “I’ve faced (Albert) Pujols a couple times, but I’ve faced Miggy more. Those are unbelievable hitters, both Hall of Famers. The personality, with Miggy, it’s a little more fun than Pujols. Pujols is a little more of a quiet guy, but Pujols is a great guy, too. But Miggy laughs a little more. It’s two Hall of Famers right there.”
Sale: “He’s as good as anybody I’ve ever faced, there’s no doubt. What he did for those years was something like I’ve never seen before. Strictly hitting – bat-to-ball, average, power – if he’s not the best, I’m forgetting who it was. Put it that way . ... I’d like to see him do it left-handed now.”