Miguel Cabrera is the reason you don’t trade Juan Soto

Miguel Cabrera was the easy comparison for Juan Soto when it was made available and eventually shipped from DC to San Diego. Miggy was the last historically good hitter to be traded at a still young age. He was 25 when he started in Detroit after inventing Florida.

Cabrera had exactly the Hall of Fame career the Tigers could only hope for when they acted for him. It looks like he will go down in history as one of the greatest right-handers of all time very well it may be for him. The Tigers won four straight division titles in the early 2010s with Cabrera as a hammer in their lineup.

The Marlins, of course, haven’t done anything since losing Cabrera because their trade didn’t give them multiple plus players. Andrew Miller eventually became a main contributor, but long after he left Florida. Cameron Maybin was a good player, but not much more. And that was it. Don’t get a trade like this out of the way, you spend a decade or more wandering the wasteland of mediocrity, muttering about how good it used to be while tasting nothing but sand. That could be the Nationals from now on.

But it goes even deeper. In recent years, or maybe longer, sports have been judged in a simple, binary way. You either win the World Series or you don’t. It’s more common in the NBA or NFL, but you see it everywhere now. While only one team wins each year and there are a whole lot of factors that go into championships that nobody can plan or strategize against, we tend to see things that way. You can’t be a better running organization than the Dodgers, the only team that strives to field the best team it can every day, every season. And yet they’ve only won one World Series recently, and that’s in the 2020 season-in-a-can that some will never consider fully viable. Because of this, many people see them as failures, although pretty much any fan would swap places for the ones in blue.

This unique chase was an excuse for teams to be led in all possible ways and served as a shield to defend all types of moves and cost cuts. It’s mutated now so we can see through it, but every time a team runs a player approaching 30 or trades them before the free hand, every time a team moves along a fan favorite, will they tell you that it is the hunt for the most efficient way to the World Series. While expanding the playoffs was primarily about TV money, it was also about that.

By that standard, Miggy’s career in Detroit could be considered a failure. The Tigers never won a World Series with him, only getting where they were nullified once #EvenYear. There were two additional ALCS losses that sandwiched this voyage in 2011 and 2013. The day the Tigers pulled the trigger to bring Miggy north, they told themselves and their fans that it was the most important step in bringing a World Series winner to Motor City for the first time since 1984 It didn’t work out that way and yet you tell the Tigers fans they have lost nothing. Ask any of them you can find and they will tell you that Cabrera was the source of so many memories and fun that they honestly don’t care that there wasn’t a World Series win. If they care, it’s almost certainly more sympathy for Cabrera than what they’ve been missing. Miggy deserves it, they’ll say.

Cabrera will be the defining player for so many Tigers fans, what they remember most during the crushingly dark Detroit winters and what will make them giggle on another mindless day at the office. Those are all memories of a World Series win anyway. Cabrera will be the first thing that comes to mind for a generation of Tigers fans when they think about what it is like to be a Tigers fan.

Nats fans will miss this now. They’ll have 2019, sure, but if they think about Soto, there’s going to be a hole. Ten to 15 years of watching one of the best in football at work every day is a rare pleasure, one that a fan cherishes above all else.

But I suppose it screams at the rain that owners and GMs stopped caring long ago, deepening a bond between fan and team. On the surface, there are plenty of reasons the Nats will lose this trade even if Soto leaves San Diego as a free agent after 2024. The biggest reason is they don’t get anything back will be Juan Soto. But beneath that surface, robbing Nats fans is something that would have made being a Nats fan different than anywhere else. That they could enjoy Juan Soto every day. That in 10 or 20 or 30 years they won’t be talking about him in those hushed tones like I talk about Ryne Sandberg or Andre Dawson or yes, even Sammy Sosa, although Cubs owners like to pretend he never existed. This is perhaps the greatest crime of all.

– Let’s top this off with another new legend, namely Vlad Guerrero Jr. beating this screaming Mimi in Minnesota:

115MPH. In MLB, there have only been 15 home runs all season that have been hit from a starting angle of 17 degrees or less. But the numbers aren’t needed to appreciate this seed, which might have burrowed through someone’s guts if everyone hadn’t gotten out of their way and prayed it hadn’t caused a crater in the finish field’s stands. Hopefully Jays fans get a career full of moments like this.