he was afraid facing Clemens, he shrugs and says, "Naw." Okay then, I counter, "What's your biggest fear on earth?"

"People. You can't trust people."

I ask Cabrera whether he'd been wronged by anyone in particular. Bentz lends a hand: "When Miguel gets on the plane for America, he's a kid dealing with a new language, culture, pressure. Then he wins the World Series. Now everybody wants something, here and in Venezuela. Miguel is loyal. He expects the same." Cabrera won't elaborate except to say that, for him, "baseball was easy. Outside is the hard part."

When Cabrera arrived in the States, he shared an apartment in Florida with five Latin American A-ball players. Back then, "I speak no English -- zero. You can't do anything because you don't go placeswhere you have to speak. You go to eat, you eat same thing: Burger King, No. 3. They ask, 'French fries?' You say yes. They ask for size, you say yes. They ask, 'Medium or large?' You say yes." First he signed up for English classes. Later he devoured newspapers at the advice of Adrian Gonzalez, his Rookie-ball roommate. "People make fun of me because they say I see only the pictures," he says, "but I learn to see the words they say."

But just as Cabrera was growing more comfortable with the language, as well as the forgiving ears of his teammates, he was rejected by the Marlins. In December of 2007, after his fifth season with the ballclub, he recalls in a hushed tone, "I was driving