For about a year and a half, Gustavo Cabrera was living the dream. In July of 2012, at the age of 16, he signed a $1.3 million contract with the Giants. He got to tell his friends and family he’d taken the first step. He could have taken care of his family in the Dominican Republic, bought them the things they’d always wanted, given them the lives they’d always deserved. He would have seen himself as someone with great things in store, things that very, very few people could ever do. He would have had this great hope for the future, like it was calling to him, like it was wide open, like he could do anything he dreamed of.
In November of 2013, he accidentally put his arm through a glass table, and it slashed him to the bone. He cut through tendons and arm structure, blood vessels and nerves. If the Giants hadn’t jumped on his treatment, pulling all sorts of strings to get him into surgery in the US within two days, he almost certainly would have lost his hand.
It was half a miracle that he healed enough to play baseball again. Cabrera played two games in 2015, 52 in 2016, and 16 in 2017. But he only got that half miracle, just enough to keep his hand and be a person, not enough to be a professional baseball player. In March of 2018, less than two months after his 22nd birthday, it was time to face reality. He would never be able to perform at a high enough level to make the majors. So he retired.
Gustavo Cabrera died yesterday at the age of 25.
As an outsider, it’s easy to just lump Gustavo Cabrera in as the concluding chapter of the Giants’ trilogy of failed Latin super-prospects. Angel Villalona might have killed a guy a little bit. Rafael Rodriguez either wasn’t good enough or didn’t work hard enough to make it. Gustavo Cabrera almost cut his hand off. Different guys, same result, same bottom line to the Giants fan: they didn’t even sniff the majors.
Except Cabrera was more than that. They were all more than that, really, but Villalona and Rodriguez will get to have second chapters in their lives, private chapters (even if it’s, uh, an open question whether we should feel good about Villalona getting that chance). Cabrera got three years of that, three years of what would have been his real life, his post-baseball life. Three years to define himself beyond a sport that had defined him for a decade. Three years to build a new future, a new self.
There is so much that Gustavo Cabrera could have had, should have had. He should have had a fair shot, a way to prove himself in baseball. He could have had a career, made money that he passed down for generations. If he was able to fight his way back to a field after just about severing his hand, then he’d have been able to put in the work to make it, handle the setbacks, keep driving forward on those bad days, those 200-people-in-the-stands-in-Visalia-when-it’s-104-degrees days.
And even if he hadn’t made it, either in the counterfactual world where he didn’t hurt his hand but ran into a developmental wall or in the closer-to-real one where he still couldn’t play baseball but at least made it through COVID, he’d have had the money and the drive to make a difference back home. All I know about his character comes from glowing quotes from within the organization and the work that he put in to try to come back, but that’s enough. Even without being a baseball player, he still could have been somebody.
Instead of that, though, he’s one of the 3 million people around the world who’ve died from COVID. He fought his way back from a brutal, nearly crippling injury, only to die from the virus that’s ruined the world over the last year. He might have thought he’d be fine since he was young, or he might have taken it seriously and just happened to catch it anyway; COVID doesn’t care about your opinions, and it’ll hit just as hard no matter what you think.
Gustavo Cabrera’s life was defined by luck. He was lucky enough to have the rare talent to get signed by a major league team, and unlucky enough to see a freak accident torpedo his career. He was lucky to save his hand, but not lucky enough to be able to play baseball with it; lucky to have been in a position to earn that big bonus, unlucky to have been put in a position where he’d never earn another one. Lucky to have ever gotten a chance, unlucky that it ended before 2021, when he would have been safely ensconced in the mostly sealed world of baseball, cut off from the outside world and its viruses.
He was unlucky to have contracted COVID, unlucky to have died from it. And we’re unlucky that we’ll never really know who he is. The people who he could have helped in a long, happy life are unlucky that he won’t be there for him. The friends and family who should have had more decades, the community who should have had one more member, everyone who should have had him as part of their lives, they’re all unlucky.
The world will remember Gustavo Cabrera as Giants fans do, as a prospect who had an accident and didn’t make it. Those close to him will remember him as the person he was, in ways that we don’t know. There should have been so many more people who got to know him over so many more years. 25 is impossibly young, you realize a few years after you’re 25. He won’t get that chance to grow and reflect. The world could have had one more special person in it. Instead, we just get this.