There is nothing to distort the fabric of a baseball game like the possibility of a landmark hit.
Much in the same way a supermassive object warps the space around it—playing around with standards of direction and motion and time—the quest for a milestone screws with the experience of the game. As a player draws closer to, say, Hit No. 3,000, the effect grows more pronounced. Each plate appearance feels either too slow or too fast. The inning falls out of favor as the primary unit of time: “This is his second chance tonight” communicates far more about what matters here than “It’s the fifth inning.” A strange kind of gravity develops in the lineup, where the centerpiece is not the leadoff hitter, or the cleanup guy, but him. The score feels irrelevant—the game is structured on an entirely different organizing principle. All that matters now is the pursuit of history, and the desires of the crowd will shift accordingly. (This means that a walk is now cause for disappointment and a bloop single is equivalent to a home run.) There is no escaping this feeling; it does not matter if the player is at the plate or in the field or down in the dugout. The sensation is bigger than any given moment. There is nowhere to hide: This is what it means to wait.
Such is the environment in which Miguel Cabrera has spent the last few days.
He entered Thursday with 2,999 career hits—the peak of this distorting effect. Oh, sure, the tension is there at 2,998 and 2,997 and 2,993 and 2,986. But it does not crystallize into something physical, palpable, until a hitter enters a game at 2,999. And there was Cabrera on Thursday, heading out for an afternoon game against the Yankees, dwarfing every other player and number and story line in the ballpark.
He flied out to left. He struck out swinging on a curve. He struck out swinging on a sinker. And finally, in the eighth inning, he came to the plate for his last attempt of the day. It was a one-run game. There were Tigers on second and third with two outs. This was, in other words, a perfect opportunity to land the milestone and play the hero, a narrative dream.
So the Yankees called to walk him.
It was a perfectly reasonable baseball decision. (Fill the empty base with two outs in a close game to get to a left-on-left matchup—why not?) It was an example of how those reasonable baseball decisions can often chafe against the interests of fandom. And, more than anything, it was stupidly, deeply funny. The decision backfired for Yankees skipper Aaron Boone—two runs went on to score on a double from Tigers outfielder Austin Meadows—but it revealed some incredible comedic timing on his part. Everyone was waiting. They had been waiting all day and, in a sense, all month, all winter. The milestone’s grand distorting effect was finally at its strongest: Everything in the game up to this point felt like a cosmically ordained setup.
To which Boone said, Actually, haha, never mind. Oh, sorry, were you all waiting for something? There’s a ballgame to win here! Which, of course, he promptly lost.
The fans lost their minds. The Tigers went on to win 3–0. Cabrera sits at 2,999.
It caps a circus of a series for the slugger. Cabrera came into this three-game stretch against the Yankees on Hit No. 2,995. The first game saw him single to center to reach 2,996. The third game saw the aforementioned intentional walk after a hitless day. And the second game—the game in which he skipped up to the threshold of history—saw him do this:
You do not need any numbers to appreciate that. All you need is “Miguel Cabrera legs out an infield single,” a phrase befitting another decade, a Proustian madeleine for Tigers fans. It did not feel like Hit No. 2,997 as much as it felt like something that could have been Hit No. 1,409, or Hit No. 738, or Hit No. 1. How glorious, how rare, to get to slip backward in time like this. And if you do want some numbers? A -46° launch angle with an official distance of 2 feet for an expected batting average of .080, one of his most unlikely hits in years, if not longer. That is not a hit for this version of Miguel Cabrera! That looks nothing like a hit.
Yet in that game on Wednesday, for him, it was. Which suddenly made the rest of the night feel like it had to be inevitable: If the fabric of the game already feels a little warped, there’s nothing to lose in believing in magic, is there? If 39-year-old Miguel Cabrera gets a hit on his first plate appearance of the game like that, hustling to first on a chopper, he’s getting as many hits as he needs that night. Isn’t he? For a few hours, it was easy to believe. His second plate appearance was another single. Hit No. 2,998. His third? Of course. Another! Hit No. 2,999.
And his fourth—leading off the bottom of the eighth inning in another close game—was a strikeout.
Hit No. 2,999, where he will stay for at least one more day, held hitless and teased by an intentional walk.
Time has stretched and slowed and opened up backward onto itself all week. It will have to do the same tomorrow. If this is about the long game—not about Hit No. 3,000 so much as the weight of Hits No. 1 to 2,999—Cabrera’s journey got a tiny bit longer on Thursday. But there was something magical to it. It was a reminder that time can drag, and the lineup can warp, and each plate appearance can still have some sparkling, improbable delight in it, some nostalgic hustle on a chopper or a hysterically timed intentional walk.
Miguel Cabrera has tomorrow, and the day after, and as many days as he might need after that. What a gift.
