Even if he doesn’t change a thing from last season, Miguel Cabrera should be one of the best hitters in Major League Baseball in 2016. Given that he won his fourth batting title in five years in 2015, that just seems like a safe assessment.
But because we’re all a bunch of spoiled Cabrera-ites, what we really want to know is whether the Detroit Tigers star can be an elite power hitter again. Specifically, the 40-homer variety.
Well, there’s good news and not-so-good news. Which do you want first?
The good news? OK, then.
But first, the obligatory background.
After launching 44 dingers each year en route to back-to-back American League MVPs in 2012 and 2013, Cabrera managed only 25 in 2014 and 18 in 2015. That was the first time he failed to top 20 homers since his rookie year in 2003, when he played in only 87 games.
But Cabrera, who turns 33 in April, is going into 2016 with one advantage he didn’t have in 2014 or 2015: good health.
After undergoing core muscle surgery before 2014, having right ankle and foot surgery before 2015 and missing over a month with a left calf strain toward the end of last season, right now is the first time in a while that Cabrera hasn’t been broken in some way. Even better, he’s feeling it where it counts.
“I feel the difference,” Cabrera said last month in reference to his swing, via Katie Strang of ESPN.com. “I can feel my back leg more. Also, I can stay more back so I can drive the ball up the gap.”
As if to prove the point, the veteran first baseman’s second hit of the spring season was a three-run homer:
A sight like that is especially encouraging after what happened with Cabrera in 2015, as it wasn’t by accident that he hit for power at the worst rate of his career.
According to FanGraphs, Cabrera posted his lowest fly-ball percentage (32.7) since 2003. Also, he hit fly balls hard at a rate of 43.0 percent. That’s pretty good in a vacuum, but it was roughly a 10 percent decrease from where he’d been the previous three seasons.
Knowing this, it’s somewhat impressive that Cabrera’s .196 ISO (that’s isolated power) was still good enough to rank him among the top 20 power hitters in the American League. If he could do that with such a banged-up lower half, then, hey, you can’t fault Tigers teammate Victor Martinez for being optimistic about what Cabrera could do at full strength in 2016.
“You saw what he did last year. He won a batting title, but maybe those balls weren’t traveling like they used to,” Martinez told Strang. “But this year, given his ankle’s feeling better, he’s able to condition more and strengthen more in his legs, I wouldn’t be shocked if we went out there and hit 40 [homers] again.”
For Cabrera’s 40-homer power to return, maybe it really is this simple.
It would be one thing if his hitting prowess had also crumbled, but his .323 average and .401 OBP over the last two seasons nix that idea. It’s really only his power that’s been missing, and his string of lower-half injuries is a pretty logical place to put the blame for that.
Now that he’s healthy, the other side of that logic coin does indeed state that his power will go back to normal in 2016.
Unless, of course, what’s happened with his power isn’t a fluke. Cue the not-so-good news.
With Opening Day creeping ever closer, now is a good time to look at the projections for 2016. And where Cabrera is concerned, none of the big ones expect him to even come close to 40 homers. According to FanGraphs, ZiPS projects 24 dingers and Steamer projects 26 dingers. Baseball Prospectus’ PECOTA system is a bit more optimistic, but only to the extent of expecting…27 dingers.
Clearly, the projections don’t see Cabrera’s power output over the last two seasons as an injury-induced aberration. They see it as more like a new normal, and history is very much on their side.
As easy as it is for us to write off Cabrera’s power decline as a casualty of his injuries, his age throws a wrench in that idea. Even putting aside the possibility that the injury bug isn’t done with him yet, there’s the reality that he’s at an age when power declines don’t tend to reverse themselves.
A few years ago, Eno Sarris of FanGraphs presented an aging curve for isolated power that showed a sharp downward slope for players in their 30s. Though Cabrera broke the mold when he hit his power peak in his age-29 and age-30 seasons in 2012 and 2013, where his power is right now is in line with where it’s supposed to be.
In a related story, there’s not a lot of precedent for Cabrera’s power to get back to its peak.
The list of 33-year-olds who have topped 40 homers contains only 17 names. Cabrera adding his name to the list would require him to effectively double his average of 22 home runs per year across 2014 and 2015. The only 33-year-old to ever make a leap that large was Ken Caminiti in 1996, and he famously had some help doing so.
The picture doesn’t change much if the focus is shifted from home runs to isolated power. Cabrera posted a .282 ISO as he was mashing all those dingers in 2012 and 2013, and even so much as getting over—to pick a random but reasonable number—.250 in 2016 would make him only the 39th 33-year-old batting-title qualifier to do so.
That would require a 45-point increase over Cabrera’s .205 ISO across his age-31 and age-32 seasons in 2014 and 2015. Of the 38 players who have pushed their ISO across .250 in their age-33 seasons, only 12 experienced an increase that large from their previous two seasons. Not surprisingly, half of them were steroid-era guys.
If there’s a bright side here, it’s that we’re obviously not talking about some random schlub who lucked into a couple 40-homer seasons before falling back to earth.
We’re talking about Miguel Cabrera, who has a firm place among the greatest hitters ever. If he makes it his mission to hit over 40 homers again, it would be foolish to underestimate him.
However, Cabrera doesn’t sound like a guy who’s about to commit to a mission like that.
“I want my power, but you don’t look for home runs,” Cabrera said in January, via Anthony Fenech of the Detroit Free Press. “You look for good contact and try to be consistent. If you look to pull the ball in the gap, the home runs are going to come.”
Consider this a reminder that Cabrera isn’t a great power hitter. He is, and always has been, a great hitter with power. And looking at how he operated in 2015, this may be more true now than ever before.
Cabrera’s .338 average and .440 on-base percentage last season didn’t happen by accident. He tightened up his discipline and took more walks. In lieu of fly balls, he pushed his line-drive rate to a career-high 25.2 percent. He also put on his Derek Jeter hat and went the other way more than ever, hitting the ball to right field a career-high 33.5 percent.
In all, he went from being a tremendously well-rounded hitter to being even more of a tremendously well-rounded hitter.
Cabrera could abandon the approach he had last year for the sake of hitting a bunch more home runs in 2016. But considering that his mindset is to let home runs come to him, it seems much more likely that he’ll stick with it and run into just a few more home runs.
Of course, it’s still hard to disagree with Martinez. It really wouldn’t be shocking if Cabrera hit 40 homers in 2016. Heck, at this point, nobody should be shocked by anything that Cabrera does at the plate.
But nobody should be disappointed if he doesn’t get there. Cabrera’s improved health makes another 40-homer season an intriguing possibility, but neither his age nor his approach is conducive to him actually getting there.
So, here’s our advice: Rather than 40 homers, just expect another season of great hitting out of Cabrera. With him, that’s never anything less than a certainty.
Stats courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com and FanGraphs unless otherwise noted/linked.
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