Marlins honoring Miguel Cabrera is bittersweet. He’s the star they never should have traded | Opinion

We hardly ever know as it happens when a moment will grow into a forever memory. There is one to share about Miguel Cabrera. It is perfect to share because it begins with youthful naivete and ends with the wistfulness age brings. It is perfect to share now as Cabrera, at 40 the retiring Detroit Tigers superstar, returns this weekend to Miami, where his Hall of Fame career began in a Marlins uniform.

The memory belongs to David Samson, the longtime former Marlins president who both drafted Cabrera to Miami and five years later traded him away in a deal that would never stop haunting or hurting.

This is the short version of that memory.

The long one takes about 13 years to tell.

It is the night of October 25, 2003, at hallowed Yankee Stadium, which the then-Florida Marlins turned quiet in Game 6 by winning the World Series. In the joyous bedlam of a clubhouse filled with the spray of champagne and smoke from Jack McKeon’s victory cigar, Cabrera and Samson hugged.

Cabrera was then a smooth-faced baseball baby at age 20, a rookie.

“This is great! Let’s do this every year!” he shouted above the din to Samson.

The club president, himself then only 35, told him, “It’s hard to do, but let’s try!”

It’s human nature. You think something difficult seems easy until you know better. It reminds me of Dan Marino reaching the Super Bowl in his second season in 1984. “I thought we’d be back a lot more times,” he would say much later.

Marino never went back to another Super Bowl, nor have the Dolphins.

The Marlins haven’t been back to a World Series since.

Cabrera would reach one more, with the Tigers in 2012, the year he won the Triple Crown last won in 1967. But Detroit got swept.

Samson’s memory got its ending around 2016. It was just before Jeffrey Loria sold the Marlins to Bruce Sherman and Samson became an ex-baseball executive who would make a successful transition into sports media. It was about the time that the prime of Cabrera’s career was ebbing.

“We ran into Miguel. He was getting older,” Samson recalls.

The great hitter who as a rookie thought winning a World Series would be a regular thing looked at Samson with a faint smile and a small shrug and said:

“Still trying...”

Twenty years after a rookie helped the Marlins win their last World Series, the club will honor Cabrera this weekend in his final visit as a major-leaguer.

Friday the Marlins will wear old-school teal uniforms and have a pregame ceremony for Miggy with videos and an on-field presentation. Saturday the team’s Heritage Series will honor Cabrera’s native Venezuela, where a small boy from the Le Pedrera barrio of Maracay would go on to become the greatest ballplayer that country had ever produced. Sunday promises the emotion of finality, for a final at-bat, for a doff of the cap.

For Marlins fans the whole weekend is cloaked in what-might-have-been had the Marlins, on December 4, 2007, not traded a player just as he was entering his prime — the greatest player ever to wear a Marlins uniform.

Does that sound like hyperbole? A quick response:

There are only three players in major-league history to have at least 3,000 hits, 500 home runs and a .300 average. Their names are Hank Aaron, Willie Mays and Cabrera.

In five years with Miami, Cabrera hit 138 home runs, had four straight 100-RBI, .300 seasons, and made four all-star teams.

Jeff Conine, back with the Marlins as a special assistant, was then a teammate.

“Already you could see the special player he was,” Conine said. “We were witnessing one of the greatest right-handed hitters in baseball history.”

Said Samson: “He was what everyone hoped and thought he would be. You think about how few players actually meet expectations.”

Why the Marlins traded Cabrera — whom they knew was a future Hall of Famer — is a lament familiar across much of the club’s 31-year history: For a small-spending club with light-pocket owners, it’s always money and business coming first, and steering baseball decisions.

After the Marlins won in 2003 they vowed to get a deal done for a new ballpark by ‘07.

“We expected Miguel to be a lifetime Marlin,” said Samson.

But they could not close that stadium deal (the new ballpark would not open until 2012), so, with Cabrera due a financial windfall in arbitration or with a new contract, “We had to take the payroll down.”

The Marlins would trade Cabrera and starting pitcher Dontrelle Willis to Detroit in exchange for pitcher Andrew Miller, outfielder Cameron Maybin and three other lesser-ranked prospects.

This is where what Samson said comes back to haunt: You think about how few players actually meet expectations.

This turned into unquestionably the worst trade in Marlins history. Miller and Maybin were two of the top five prospects in all of MLB at the time. Had either or both become big stars, the sting of losing Cabrera would at least have been less.

“My regret is not the actual trade,” says Samson today. “My regret is that we could not get a [new ballpark] deal done to not have to trade him. The toughest part of my career...”

Samson in retrospect admits the larger fault in the way the Loria-era Marlins ran their business.

“Could we have been a better franchise? Yes. We were not Tampa,” he says of the team that manages to win despite frugality. “We didn’t have the discipline to stick to decisions the way Tampa does. They run with no emotions. They get rid of their players two years early. We did it two years late They were not attracted to big names like we were. We cared about winning offseasons and bringing in brand-name players. We should have allowed our front office to build with young players . Jeffrey [Loria] didn’t want to wait. He thought he was too old.”

Alas, they had a young player to build around, a generational, foundational talent in Cabrera, but let him get away.

The Marlins have unloaded too many stars through the years because budget always spoke louder than baseball, but this is the one that especially hurt, and still does, to the very end.

South Florida has more Venezuelan-Americans than any region in the country. Caracas is a three-hour flight. Miami never left Cabrera, and Cabrera never left Miami. He still lives here in the offseason.

Now he is back in Miami — back home — this weekend for goodbye, and you can’t help still feeling after all these years that he will be in the wrong dugout, in the wrong uniform.