on the diamond and called Cabrera cabeza tren (train head) for his large noggin. Cabrera disliked the handle but knew "if you get mad, they call you that every day. Can't show it."

Young Cabrera learned to keep his thoughts bottled up, and the older one isn't much different. His parents, he says, are divorced. His father, Miguel, ran an auto shop. His mom, Gregoria, was a longtime veteran of the national softball team but left her son's training to his uncle, David Torres, a former minor league baseball player. Cabrera was 15 when he tried out for Louie Eljaua, then a Marlins scout. Impressed by the boy's sure fielding, cannon arm and spring-loaded bat, Eljaua called scouting director Al Avila, who traveled to Venezuela to watch Cabrera playbefore phoning his boss. "This kid's a special talent," Avila told then-Marlins GM Dave Dombrowski.

At 16 Cabrera signed with the Marlins for $1.8 million. At 20 he smacked a walk-off homer in his big league debut. Four months after that, he was in his first World Series, squaring off against Roger Clemens. True to form, the Rocket began by firing a fastball past Cabrera's chin. The kid stared at the legend and then got to work, with two swinging strikes, another ball and two foul-offs before eventually driving the seventh pitch over the rightfield wall. "It still makes me smile," recalls Mike Redmond, his former teammate and the current Marlins manager. "I looked at Jeff Conine and said, 'This kid isn't afraid of anything.'"

When I ask Cabrera whether