Detroit Tigers slugger Miguel Cabrera made the news this week after he confirmed he will be retiring after the 2023 campaign.
He will be putting an end to a marvelous career that gave him all kinds of awards and achievements.
He has been a below-average hitter for a couple of years now, but from 2004 to 2016 he was an absolute monster and one of the best right-handed hitters this league has seen.
In fact, baseball analyst Sung Min Kim offered us something to understand just how great he was at his best.
“I’m sure no one forgot Miguel Cabrera’s greatness from the past, but this really put that in perspective for me. His 2015 Baseball Savant metrics,” he tweeted, with a picture of Cabrera’s Statcast Profile.
I'm sure no one forgot Miguel Cabrera's greatness from the past, but this really put that in perspective for me. His 2015 Baseball Savant metrics: pic.twitter.com/hQYjxTaY2a
— Sung Min Kim (@sung_minkim) November 29, 2022
A Mind-Blowing Statcast Profile
The Statcast profile includes things like hard-hit rate, average and max exit velocity, barrel rate, and several other useful bits of data.
The information is presented in percentile rankings: when a player, for example, ranks in the 80th percentile in average exit velocity, it means that only 20 percent of the league fared better than him in that particular stat.
Cabrera’s 2015 profile was full of 100 and high-90s: it means he was either the best in MLB or among the elite in categories such as average and max exit velo, hard-hit rate, xWOBA, expected batting average, expected slugging percentage, barrel rate, and BB%.
That picture is extremely impressive and tells us everything we need to know about prime Cabrera: he hit the ball hard often, he had elite plate discipline, and deserved his excellent performance judging by the quality and quantity of contact.
He was a true monster for more than a decade.
NEXT: Miguel Cabrera's Reach Goes Beyond The Diamond