It may be the MLB All-Star break, but that doesn’t mean we have to take a break too. Chris Davis and Miguel Cabrera are giving us every reason to look past this week and think about what’s ahead. By Jesse Dougherty.
For these two, the story is in the numbers
Jesse Dougherty-
Well, it’s time to take a break.
Baseball’s best are heading to New York and obsessive fans are just days removed from pretending to care what league garners home field advantage for the World Series. The All-Star break breaks a routine three months in the making. It’s like rearranging the furniture in a blind man’s living room or waking up to find an empty gallon of milk in the fridge. This could just be the one week of the year where following overblown coverage of your favorite league’s free agency period actually makes sense. The summer sports calendar is driven by baseball, whether you like it or not, but for four days will be driven by nothing at all.
So let’s find something to talk about. American sprinters are doping; I never thought Tyson Gay to be the muscle milk type. For one weekend, George Zimmerman was the center of social media fanaticism. On Monday, Aaron Hernandez will promptly retake his post. Metta World Peace is heading to the concrete jungle where dreams are made of (if you didn’t read that in Alicia Keys’ voice go read it again). If there ever was a time for his rap career to take off, it’s now.
But that’s just a limp attempt to avert my attention from baseball because, after all, we’re supposed to be taking a break. Yet even a second without the game would render the summer landscape even more bleak than it already is. After all, Tebow isn’t on a sideline and neither is Derrick Rose, so what else is there to talk about if not America’s game? If you answered that with Marcus Vick‘s Twitter account, go take a lap around something.
Let’s start with baseball’s top story and look no further. Chris Davis and Miguel Cabrera are five rounds deep in the best heavyweight boxing match since McGwire and Sosa reinvented baseball in 1998. Through Sunday, Davis has 37 home runs and 93 RBIs, while Cabrera keeps pace with a colossal 30 and 96. Cabrera is also hitting .365 and is .44 batting average points ahead of Mike Trout, who fittingly trails him in second place. If there ever was a post-steroid era moment that didn’t involve the Biogenesis clinic rehashing baseball’s darkest days, it’s this.
Should Davis and Cabrera finish this season how they’ve started, then pan out as clean in the next two to three years, Alex Rodriguez will be confused. Because there’s no way that one guy, let alone two, can succeed in a modern era that uses periodic drug tests as one big talent-sucking straight jacket. But not so fast. Davis and Cabrera aren’t just routinely crushing baseballs, but proving that an actual detox could exist. Not the Ryan Braun type, but a full on detox from a time where nerdy trainers injected more butts than they kissed.
Davis is tall and sinewy, built to screw in a light bulb with a swing that screams long ball. Cabrera exudes versatility with a physical makeup that would sink in a pool but float just about everywhere else. Most notably Major League Baseball where he has, in an unforgettable two-year hiatus from reality, made himself the game’s best hitter since Tony Gwynn.
In the two and a half months following the All-Star break Davis and Cabrera will go head-to-head for many things. Cabrera will chase a second-straight MVP, and Davis’s slugging prowess will provide a formidable roadblock. He’ll also vie for a second straight Triple Crown and again, Davis we’ll have something to say. While they each play to push their respective squads into October, we’ll speculate that they’re following each other’s every move.
Davis on the other hand is looking to etch his name in history. Cabrera is already there, a trailblazer who doesn’t need PEDs to pull off some of baseball’s most impressive feats. But Davis, for now, is just playing a cameo in Cabrera’s supporting cast. If this is the season that turns it all around, with the MLB investigating the Biogenesis clinic and these two sluggers giving fans a reason to believe in integrity again, Davis is looking to steal the show. If he doesn’t he’ll be a modern day Leif Erickson, the forgotten hero in a tale of one man.
That doesn’t seem so bad, right? To be a part, however small, of a movement greater than any statistic that anyone will post this season. But athletes are vertically defined by their accomplishments and the lucky ones are given a small window of time to achieve greatness. Cabrera is adding to a legacy that will forever define him, while Davis is trying to piece together a season that will have a similar effect. Together, they’re pioneering baseball into its next phase of stormy development.
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