Future Hall of Famer

I was a little disappointed when I realized that Miguel Cabrera got the day off in Sunday's Tigers/Mets series finale. It's OK to be selfish once in a while: I looked forward to seeing the healthy-again lifetime .316 hitter. But with no DH in a National League park, the likely future Hall of Famer (now 270 hits shy of 3000) spent most of the afternoon on the bench while Brandon Dixon played 1st base.

The youngest member of the Marlins 2003 World Championship squad is also the most recent player to win the Triple Crown -- he pulled off that feat in 2012.

Now, he's the one big (and expensive) veteran left on a Detroit club in the early stages of a rebuild. So as he spends time on the pine, one is tempted to play mind-reader: is he wondering where all his friends went? Or why the Tigers couldn't sustain their earlier-this-decade success? And probably accepting the reality that his still-massive contract (paying over $25 million annually through 2023) makes him virtually untradable.

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