Baseball: Covering the Bases

Miggy's mess-up ...

There's no word on whether the Tigers plan to discipline Miguel Cabrera for his late-night partying and subsequent domestic dispute and trip to the police station this weekend.

The greatest punishment of all, of course, would be the Tigers losing to the Twins on Tuesday and, thus, missing the playoffs -- completing one of the worst down-the-stretch collapses in major league history.

That's likely to happen, right there at the miserable Metrodome, and if so, Cabrera would be the Face of the Fizzle. Rightfully so. Sure, he's put up his typical .300 average and his 100 RBIs, but that's expected of him just as it is today's greats like A-Rod and Albert. He even hit a grand slam on Opening Day at Comerica Park, which was nice. But when it came to crunch time and the Tigers needed just a couple wins to secure their first division championship since 1987, Cabrera was nowhere to be found -- he batted an abysmal .192 during the biggest homestand of the year, the four-gamer against the Twins and three-gamer against the White Sox.

And now we come to find out on the eve of Game 2 of the White Sox series, Cabrera was out all night partying (with the opposing team, no less, reports say) rather than resting for a potential AL Central clincher.

Isn't that just a bit insulting to Tigers fans that their star first baseman -- their $153-million man -- was out drinking until possibly as late as 6 a.m. Saturday, following a series-opening loss in which he was 0-for-4?

And this wasn't just cocktail hour, by the way, this was a full night of boozing it up. According to the Birmingham Police Department, Cabrera blew a .26, more than three times the legal blood-alcohol driving limit. According to the Free Press, it was Tigers general manager Dave Dombrowski who picked Cabrera up from the police station, but that didn't happen until 7 or 8 a.m. That, of course, suggests Cabrera hardly got much sleep before he had to be at the ballpark for Saturday night's game against the White Sox, a loss, coincidentally or not, in which he went 0-for-4 and grounded into a critical double play.

OK, Cabrera is just 26, and 26-year-olds make mental lapses all the time. If I told you all the stuff I did when I was 26, well ... not without my lawyer present, OK? But the entire state of Michigan wasn't counting on you or me at 26 as they are Cabrera and Co. And, frankly, it's not asking much -- especially in the thick of a pennant race, while also trying to stave off with one of the top 10 choke jobs in pro sports history -- to be in as good of shape possible every single game, especially for a Tiger who just last year happened to sign a contract that, by the time it expires in 2015, will pay him more money than any player in franchise story.

And let's be honest: Cabrera clearly wasn't in peak physical shape Saturday -- just look at all those bruises scattered across the left side of his face, especially that intriguing circular, purple one on his temple that looks like it was caused by a blow from a foreign object (like a cell phone, perhaps; more on that in a bit). That's just unacceptable. His physical condition (soreness, fatigue, etc.) absolutely could've affected his play Saturday, when he hit exactly zero balls out of the infield and grounded the first pitch he saw in the eighth inning into a rally-killing double play just as the Tigers looked like they might be breaking through against Freddy Garcia.

The incident, too, coupled perhaps with the heavy stress of knowing the pack of reporters crowded around his locker was about to find out exactly what went down early Saturday morning (a scrap with his wife apparently caused those face welts), definitely could've spilled over into Sunday's game, in which he posted his third consecutive 0-fer (0-for-3) in a must-win game the Tigers, lucky for his sake, happened to win.

Through all of this, Cabrera has remained silent, except for one puzzling explanation to Fox Sports' Jon Paul Morosi: "It was my dog." That, it turns out, was just a nervous falsehood for an unanticipated question. The truth, as spelled out by police in a news conference this morning, was that Cabrera's wife, Roseangel, didn't take kindly to his arriving home drunk and talking on a cell phone while she and his daughter slept.

Look, I'm not naive. I know a lot of baseball players -- pro athletes of all sports, actually -- have active nightlifes, but you'd hope they'd be smarter about the timing of their indulgences. Cabrera's, behaving this way as the city holds its collective breath with every runner on third and less than two outs, was poor as can be.

So, regardless of whether you believe his saga should've remained private or been plastered over the front page of this newspaper, there's no debating Cabrera, with some questionable decisions this weekend, let down his team but also his team's fans -- fans who, by the way, poured through the Comerica Park turnstiles to the tune of the fourth-best attendance in the AL and the fifth-best in Tigers history. Despite the economy.

All those fans, of course, could be an awfully forgiving bunch -- should Cabrera step up and provide a spark in Tuesday night's winner-take-all AL Central tiebreaker against the Twins.

If he doesn't and the Tigers' season ends, Dombrowski needn't hand down any punishment. Cabrera will feel all the wrath necessary next April 9, when an Opening Day crowd surely will not have forgotten this week.