I love this kind of stuff.
If you look at a player’s Baseball-Reference page long enough, you’re bound to find interesting tidbits about their career. You already know I love this kind of stuff because of my all-time favorite Ken Griffey Jr. stat.
But today, I want to talk about Miguel Cabrera and his back-to-back AL MVP campaigns from 2012-13. Both season-long performances look quite similar when compared to one another on the surface, but he arrived at those numbers in very different ways.
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The Similarities in Miguel Cabrera’s 2012 and 2013 MVP Seasons
A lot of things were the same from 2012-13 for Cabrera. He not only beat out Mike Trout for the AL MVP Award in both years, but he also won two Silver Sluggers and was selected to two All-Star Games.
Here’s a side-by-side look at a few of Miguel Cabrera’s season-long stats:
- 2012: .330/.393/.606 line with 44 home runs, 139 RBI, 109 runs scored, and 205 hits
- 2013: .348/.442/.636 line with 44 home runs, 137 RBI, 103 runs scored, and 193 hits
Cabrera won the Triple Crown in 2012 while accumulating 7.1 bWAR. He didn’t lead the league in homers or RBI the following year, but he took home another batting title while his performance was worth 7.5 bWAR.
Let’s Not Gloss Over That Triple Crown
I don’t think it gets said enough just how rare that 2012 Triple Crown really was. Cabrera became the first player to lead his league in batting average, homers, and RBI in the same season since Carl Yastrzemski did it for the Red Sox all the way back in 1967 — a 45-year gap.
It’s the kind of feat that used to happen every so often in baseball history, and then it just… stopped happening.
What makes it even wilder is that Cabrera basically matched that historic season with an even better one the very next year, just distributed differently. A .348 average and a .442 on-base percentage in 2013 is absurd offensive production regardless of whether the counting stats line up with a Triple Crown or not.
How These Performances Differed From One Another
One of the biggest differences in Cabrera’s performances was the number of doubles he hit. Cabrera hit 40 two-baggers in ’12 and 26 in ’13. But the difference I want to zero in on is how he reached his homer totals.
This is MLB Daily Dingers, ya know. I have to talk about the homers.
In 2012, Cabrera hit 18 homers before the All-Star break, followed by 26 in the second half. But in 2013, those numbers flipped — he hit 30 in the first half and 14 after the midsummer classic.
The venues in which he slugged these homers also changed drastically between each year. In 2012, he slugged 28 homers at Comerica Park in Detroit and 16 on the road. But in 2013, only 17 homers came at Comerica, while the other 27 occurred on the road. Baseball, man — you gotta love it.
Milestone Miguel Cabrera Home Runs
Cabrera is the most recent hitter to enter the 500-homer club. He finished his soon-to-be Hall of Fame career tied with Mel Ott at 511 taters.
But honestly, we should’ve known he was destined for greatness after he slugged his first big-league homer since it was a walk-off dinger for the Florida Marlins.
It happened on June 20, 2003:
Looking for more Miguel Cabrera milestone home runs? I’ve compiled a bunch of them right here.
The 500-Homer Club Was Just the Start
Cabrera joined the exclusive 500-homer club on August 22, 2021, when he slugged a dinger off Steven Matz in Toronto against the Blue Jays.
That in itself was a momentous occasion since he was just the 28th player ever to get there. However, it also made him the first Venezuelan-born player in history to reach that milestone.
Then, less than a year later, he did something even rarer. On April 23, 2022, Cabrera picked up his 3,000th career hit with a single off Antonio Senzatela. That made him just the seventh player in MLB history to reach both 3,000 hits and 500 home runs.
You want to talk about exclusive clubs? This one includes Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, Alex Rodriguez, Eddie Murphy, Rafael Palmeiro, and Albert Pujols — legitimately about as elite a group as you’ll find in the sport’s history.
Cabrera finished his career in 2023 with a .306 lifetime average to go along with 3,174 hits, 511 home runs, and 1,881 RBI. Add a Triple Crown, two MVPs, 12 All-Star selections, seven Silver Sluggers, four batting titles, and a World Series title to that resume, and it’s not hard to see why he is very likely to be a first-ballot Hall of Famer whenever he becomes eligible.
Enjoyed this one? Sign up for the Bases Loaded Bulletin — my monthly print newsletter — for deep dives like this delivered straight to your mailbox. Or grab a copy of The Power Kings for the full story of every MLB franchise’s greatest home run seasons.
