Cabrera Wins Triple Crown

Cabrera mashed his way to the Triple Crown in 2012 (SBNation)

Miguel Cabrera accomplished something no baseball player has done in 45 years. He led the league in home runs, runs batted in, and batting average, becoming the first man since Carl Yastrzemski to win the Triple Crown. Cabrera’s 44 homers and 139 RBI topped the majors, and his .330 batting average made him the American League batting champ for the second year in a row.

Since 1900, the Triple Crown has been achieved 14 times by a dozen different players (Rogers Hornsby and Ted Williams, the best pure hitters of all time, did it twice) but Cabrera is the only third baseman to win it. He dominated in other statistical categories, too, leading the league in slugging percentage, OPS, total bases and extra base hits. Cabrera could be in line for his first Most Valuable Player award after leading his Tigers to their second consecutive division title.

The scary thing is, 2012 isn't even the best season of his career. Looking at OPS and OPS+, he was better last year, and in 2010, too.

It wasn’t until September that Cabrera emerged as a legitimate threat to win the Triple Crown. Josh Hamilton was leading the league in homers and RBI for much of the season, and Trout seemed to have a stranglehold on the batting crown. Their early success forced Cabrera to play catch-up for most of the summer, and only in the season’s final weeks did he pass them on the strength of his monster second half (.337/.407/.667 with 26 home runs and 68 RBI after the All-Star Break). 

They say slow and steady wins the race. Miguel Cabrera is both painfully slow–he grounded into more double plays than anyone else this year–and he is freakishly steady.

 And sure enough, he won the race.

Cabrera receives a standing ovation from the Kansas City crowd (NYTimes)