After 20 years of an amazing professional career, Venezuelan baseball player Miguel Cabrera retires from Major League Baseball (the NBA of American baseball) under a general ovation at Comérica Park, the home of the Detroit Tigers. Cabrera was also honored in the stadiums of American cities by each of the teams that belong to the best baseball league in the world in his last weeks as an active player. At 40 years old, he had declared that this would be his last professional player. One of the highest paid players in MLB, “hangs up his spikes”leaving behind him an unusual and astonishing harvest of laurels in the offensive sector, which have made him one of the best hitters in the history of the league, of more than a century of existence, and a living legend of this sport .
His numbers, in a discipline in which statistics have a fundamental interpretive weight in a player’s performance, are astonishing: a triple batting crown (only achieved by ten players in more than a century, the first in 55 years and the first achieved by a Latin American); 3,000 hits and 500 lifetime home runs (third baseball player to achieve this in 150 years); four batting championships and 11 championship series finals; two Most Valuable or MVP awards; 12-time MLB All-Star Game selection; four-time American League home run champion.
Cabrera is the second Latin American with the most singles in the history of American baseball, behind the Dominican Albert Pujol. His personal numbers in other batting variables (doubles, triples, runs scored and RBIs) occupy the first positions of all time in the history of MLB, a tutelary league in the world of baseball, with many imported Latin American, Canadian, and Japanese players. and Koreans, which is also very popular in countries such as the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Panama, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Puerto Rico, Canada, Mexico, Taiwan, and to a lesser extent, Colombia, Australia and the Netherlands Antilles.
There are many who take for granted Cabrera’s entry into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, for which he will be eligible five years after his retirement, in view of the solidity of his numbers and his good performance outside of sports. In some informative notes, Cabrera is already presented as “the next member of the MBL Hall of Fame.” He would be the second Venezuelan to achieve this, after Luis Aparicio, in 1984.
Cabrera’s only detractor has turned out to be Juan Vené, also Venezuelan, a veteran journalist well known in the world of baseball in the United States, a member of the specialized elite that casts the votes to evaluate the great retired baseball players of all time in Cooperstown, who made some objections to the player defensively, and who has stated that he still “does not know” if he will give him the vote on the ballots, which has unleashed a storm. Vené’s stance has generated outrage on social media and among local followers.
Born in the city of Maracay, in the central north of the country, in 1983, Cabrera – a player of 1.90 meters and enormous corpulence – debuted as a professional in 2003 with the Tigres de Aragua – the city’s team, a club where he also is revered, and which he helped obtain several local league championships – and almost immediately had a meteoric and very unusual rise to the MLB, of which he was to become one of its global symbols, receiving that same year a contract to debut with the Florida Marlins.
A first and third base player, on defense, sometimes in right field or left field in the outfield, after playing four years in Florida, Cabrera was acquired in 2008 by the Detroit Tigers, one of the most former members of the league, where he reaped most of his achievements, becoming from then on an idol and a heritage of the city.
“It has been incredible to see Cabrera surpassing so many names, so many records, on the all-time player lists. But more impressive has been how he has handled the attention behind the scenes,” Scott Harris, Detroit’s president of operations, noted Friday when commenting on his off-field conduct. “I am honored to have him as part of our front office and know he will continue to make the Tigers better in his new role.”
Cabrera’s retirement has been in the news in all the media in the United States, in addition to being unanimously celebrated and received with enormous pride by practically the entire Venezuelan society, a country in which baseball continues to be the most popular and practiced sport in all its forms. social layers. Cabrera will travel to his country later this year to be honored by the Venezuelan Professional Baseball League.
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