Collegiate Times

Last week, Miguel Cabrera of the Detroit Tigers won the Triple Crown, something that hadn't been done in 45 years.

For those unaware, the Triple Crown is earned when a baseball player leads the league in batting average, home runs and RBI. 

The Triple Crown has been awarded just 14 times in the modern era of baseball (since 1900). The feat was accomplished by twelve different players and every player is now a hall of famer.   

While I’m not ready to say Miguel Cabrera is a first ballot hall of famer, this is one of the rarest feats in sports and should have received much more attention than it did. 

The last time a player completed the Triple Crown was Carl Yastrzemski of the Boston Red Sox in 1967. This is an accomplishment that all-time greats such as Reggie Jackson, Hank Aaron, Barry Bonds and Albert Pujols never accomplished.

The biggest attention that this story had was being the lead story on Sports Center for the day. Even the next day the story was barely mentioned on the show and was overshadowed by the big football games of the upcoming weekend and whether or not Tim Tebow would see the field. 

The single-season home run record has been broken twice since the last Triple Crown. When a player was even close to that record it was the biggest news in baseball and would be tracked every night on Sports Center. For Cabrera’s Triple Crown, I wasn’t even aware he was close to winning until a week or two before hand.

One of the reasons many people feel this was a story that didn’t receive as much press was because of the other close pennant races in baseball.

I feel the main reason that this story was overshadowed is because baseball is not as big as it once was in the U.S. When the last Triple Crown occurred, the Packers were starting their title defense of the second Super Bowl and it was still three years before the NBA would implement the three-point line.

Baseball was clearly the major sport in America and no other sport was even close. Today, the NFL has claimed that spot and it’s close between the NBA and major league baseball for the second spot. It’s a shame to see Cabrera’s historic performance overshadowed by previews for NFL regular season games in just a day.

Cabrera’s image is another factor that could have pushed this story out of the paper’s faster than it should have been. He has been in trouble with the law twice in the last three years. The first was a domestic violence incident in 2009 and a DUI arrest before spring training in 2011.

No matter what Cabrera’s off-field problems are or what other major stories are happening in the world of sports, his historic season will always be considered one of the greatest offensive performances in baseball. Bottom line, he deserves more attention for his historic accomplishment. 

A version of this article appeared in the Oct 11 issue of the Collegiate Times.