LAKELAND, Fla. (AP) - Tigers General Manager Dave Dombrowski said last week that Cabrera would undergo treatment before arriving. Tigers position players reported on Feb. 18.
Cabrera didn’t deny that he had an alcohol problem, but said he was willing to undergo treatment and the Tigers have been working with doctors to find a solution. Cabrera said the incident was out of the ordinary and that he had been working on his treatment in Detroit and his hometown in Venezuela.
He refused to say he is an alcoholic.
“I have it under control,” Cabrera said. “It was just a bad decision. I plan to continue with treatment. I made a mistake this time, and all I can do is continue treatment.”
Ok, here's my take on this. I'm not expert on baseball, nor am I an expert on substance abuse. I am, however smart enough to see that the two often go hand in hand. There is something about these guys that they just love being buzzed. I think I can take it a step further and say they are obsessed with doing things to the extreme. Do you know how extreme you have to be to hit/throw an 85+ MPH anything? I've tried, and I simply stopped giving a shit literally minutes later. Just not that extreme.
Now I realize that there is a difference between using and abusing a substance, but you can't tell me that when a guy is going up to bat and he has a dip the size of a roll of quarters in his jaw, that he isn't abusing the substance. You can't tell me that a 175 lb (insert steroid junkie name here) didn't abuse the juice to become a solid 2 fiddy. Leyland smokes enough squares in the dugout that, if it was an enclosed area, the entire team would have second-hand lung cancer by the end of June.
Look, Miggy likes scotch, not because he's an alchi, but because scotch is fucking fantastic. They dude is over the top extreme. His competitive nature shows that. His passion with his family(albeit unnecessary to go as far as to lay a hand on a woman, which is pretty fucked in itself, but I'll never fully understand Hispanics. Completely different blog topic.) shows that. Obviously the guy goes about things the wrong way. Baseball is all he knows. Social and ethical norms aren't exactly this guy's forte. I'm sure educationally speaking the man isn't completely developed yet. He can't hold a press conference without a translator for fear of saying the wrong thing. I watch the guy on Tigers post-game on the regular. He speaks just fine.
So cut the guy some slack. He's only got two strikes, and this is baseball after all.
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