It looks like Daniel Cabrera - the tall, formerly hard-throwing, always on the cusp of turning the corner and dominating, pitcher - is still kicking around, having signed a minor league deal with the Chicago White Sox. As an Orioles fan, I must admit that there where times when I was fooled by a great start here or there, and thought that Cabrera was really going to harness his immense potential and turn into a top-of-the-rotation starter. It just never happened - at least for more than a couple games at a time.

D-Cab was rushed to the big leagues in 2004 as a 23 year-old with only 27.1 innings above A-Ball under his belt. He held his own though, finishing with a 12-8 record and a 5.00 ERA.

It was his second year that people probably kept coming back to in later years as something Cabrera could accomplish. In 2005 Daniel went just 10-12, but his ERA improved to 4.52. He utilized a blazing fastball (averaging around 96 mph) and a hard slider (~87 mph) to up his strike-out rate from 4.6 K/9 in his rookie season to 8.8 K/9. He also cut his walks from 5.4 BB/9 to a still bad (but better!) 4.8 BB/9, and increased his groundball rate from 43% to 53%. That resulted in a drop in his home runs rate, so whereas he was a bit fortunate in 2004 (5.10 FIP, 5.68 xFIP), in 2005 his production according to FIP (4.04) was pretty much spot-on (4.02 xFIP). That sophomore season, in which Daniel posted 2.9 WAR, turned out to be the pinnacle of his career, instead of a stepping-stone to greater things (as it seemed at the time).

In 2006 Cabrera upped his strike-out rate again, to 9.55 K/9. That placed him in some pretty good company (pitchers with at least 100 IP):

Francisco Liriano - 10.71 K/9
Scott Kazmir - 10.14 K/9
Cole Hamels - 9.86 K/9
Ben Sheets - 9.85 K/9
Jake Peavy - 9.56 K/9
Daniel Cabrera - 9.55 K/9
Johan Santana - 9.44 K/9
Pedro Martinez - 9.29 K/9

His control regressed though, to a 6.32 BB/9 rate that was easily the worst in the league (amongst pitchers with 100 IP again). The groundballs turned back into flyballs - and line-drives - and while his FIP only went up to 4.20, his xFIP was at 4.56. That's still decent for a 25 year-old in his third pro season - and at 2.7 WAR he was still a fine contributor behind Erik Bedard in the rotation - but the warning signs weren't good. That off-season people were hanging their hopes on his final start, in which Cabrera pitched a complete game one-hitter (taking a no-no into the 9th) in Yankee Stadium and gave up just one unearned run, while walking two and K'ing 5. "You just wait until next year, when he'll do that every time out!"

In 2007 he improved his control (back to "just" 4.8 BB/9) and increased the groundball rates again (to 50%), but his strike-out rate dropped to 7.3 K/9 and his FIP and xFIP both rose to 5.01 and 4.85 respectively. His 5.55 ERA was a career high (at the time). Not exactly the results that people where looking for.

2008 saw a slightly different strategy - take a little off the fastball to throw it for strikes more often. He did implement that plan, throwing the heater over 80% of the time with an average velocity in the 92.5 mph range, but the results weren't heartening. While the walks came down a little, they were still quite high at 4.5 BB/9. His strike-out rate plummeted though, to just 4.75 K/9. Cabrera's ERA improved a little over 2007 - to 5.25 - but his FIP (5.61) and xFIP (5.36) were both still pretty terrible. Daniel had gone from being an about league average starter with tremendous upside, to just above a replacement level pitcher (0.3 WAR).

Rather than risk having to pay him in arbitration, the Orioles released Cabrera and he made his way over to the National League. In his brief time with the Nationals and later - after being released again - the Diamondbacks, D-Cab went 0-6 with a 6.00 ERA. His fastball sat in the low 90s, and he walked almost twice as many men as he struck out (7.41 BB/9 to 4.06 K/9). He also went 0-17 at the plate with 10 strike-outs, and set a record of most consecutive at bats that all ended with a K at 18 in a row (to start his career, over multiple seasons). [Thanks to CamdenDepot for confirming that Cabrera does indeed own that record.]

Now he's mostly forgotten (it seemed every year fantasy baseball experts would predict his break-out season), and just hoping to make a major league pitching staff. I wish him luck with the White Sox, but at almost 30 years old there's not a lot of reason to be confident that Cabrera can figure things out. It's a shame too, since he always seemed like a pretty good guy to me. He went into baseball because he was tall and could throw really hard, but he was never a particularly good athlete (very little coordination, for example) or a particularly good pitcher. Daniel brought a lot of hope, as well as a lot of frustration, to many baseball fans over the course of his career - so there is that, I guess.

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