Toward the tail end of a Tigers team flight to Detroit a few years ago, Miguel Cabrera stood to stretch his legs and retrieve something from his bag. Around him, teammates talked and played cards, winding down after a road trip.

Jeimer Candelario, the Tigers’ young third baseman, was still getting used to playing across the diamond from the future Hall of Famer, much less sitting across the aisle from him on a private jet. Candelario had grown up watching a thin, curly-haired Cabrera play third base for the Marlins, back before Cabrera had cemented himself as a generational hitter, before he had 500 home runs, before he closed in on 3,000 hits and approached the doorstep of Cooperstown.

On that flight, Cabrera opened his bag, and Candelario broke into laughter. Conversations halted. Card games ceased. Then teammates saw what Candelario had seen, and a chorus of laughter spread through the cabin: Cabrera’s bag was stuffed with cash — a comical amount to be carrying, even for a man who’s made $400 million in baseball. Cabrera grabbed whatever he was looking for and grinned. Before folding his 6-foot-4, 270-pound frame back into his seat, he turned around and held a handful of cash in the air.

“This is what happens,” he said, “when you learn to hit the ball to right field.”

In a matter of days, Cabrera will become the 33rd member of the 3,000-hit club; the seventh hitter in MLB history with 3,000 hits and 500 home runs; and the third in an even more exclusive club: 3,000 hits, 500 homers and a .300 career batting average. Hank Aaron, Willie Mays and Miggy. That’s legendary company. (Cabrera could go 0 for his next 346 at-bats before dropping below .300.)

Cabrera was 20 when he broke into the big leagues with the Marlins and smacked a walk-off homer in his debut. He turned 39 this week. He has spent nearly half his life in the majors, earning a reputation as one of the best pure hitters of his era. The roots of his all-fields approach were laid early. Cabrera told Sports Illustrated that as a 7-year-old in Maracay, Venezuela, his uncle would throw him batting practice and tell him to hit the ball to right field or run a lap. “So,” Cabrera said, “I hit the ball the other way.” And he has ever since.

“He’s one of the greatest right-handed hitters of all time,” Phillies slugger Nick Castellanos said, adding that Cabrera’s numbers would be even greater if he hadn’t spent most of his career in pitchers’ parks in Miami and Detroit.

Castellanos is one of the many players who grew up in the game around Cabrera, whose hitting protégés are now spread across the league. This spring, as Cabrera started his 20th season and the last leg of his climb to 3,000 hits, The Athletic spoke with a dozen of those players to hear what they learned about hitting from Cabrera. They each had stories to tell and carried slivers of advice Cabrera had shared along the way as part of their hitting education.

“That was one of the biggest (reasons) I wanted to come here, to learn something from Miggy,” said Javier Báez, the Tigers’ biggest offseason addition.

When J.D. Martínez was at the lowest point of his career, barely holding on to a roster spot in Houston, he studied Cabrera’s swing more than any other — the path, the plane, the efficient and flawless mechanics. Martínez wanted that. He reinvented his swing that winter. The Astros released him anyway, in March 2014, and Martínez signed with the Tigers. Looking back now, more than 240 home runs and $130 million in career earnings later, Martínez calls landing in the same lineup as Cabrera a “God wink,” a perfect twist, an answer to prayer.

One lesson Martínez learned from Cabrera was the value of durability. For a slugger of his size, Cabrera remained remarkably healthy for most of his career — averaging 153 games played and 656 plate appearances per season from 2004 to 2017. In 2014, Cabrera played with a stress fracture in his right foot and bone spurs in his ankle. Martínez didn’t dare take a day off.

“It was like, dude, this guy is playing with a broken foot,” Martínez said. “Maybe you have one thing that hurts and another that’s kind of achy, but at the end of the day, how are you going to sit out?”

Coming up with the Tigers, Castellanos was a first-round pick who wasn’t ready to listen. “I was too stubborn to learn from anybody,” he said. Castellanos was competitive to his core. He saw batting practice with Cabrera as an opportunity to have a better round than him. (“It never turned out that way.”) Once, on another team flight, Cabrera saw Castellanos journaling. “He looks at me, takes his headphones off, and he goes, ‘Hey, when you figured out how to walk, I was already running,’ and put his headphones back on,” Castellanos said on Jomboy Media’s “The Chris Rose Rotation” podcast. “It was perfect.”

In time, Cabrera became an input Castellanos listened to. Sometimes he shared specific hitting wisdom; other times it came in tidbits so tiny their profundity only hit Castellanos much later. “A lot of times when Miggy gives advice, you can miss it,” he said. Because hitting comes so naturally to Cabrera, there’s a lot he’s unable to explain. He simply can do things others can’t. Cabrera’s words urge teammates to simplify the hitting process. His swing shows them how.

“He takes and downloads information so well,” Castellanos said. “The only thing he’s doing is playing the game. He’s not worried about mechanics. He’s not worried about what this guy will or won’t throw. He’s just playing baseball.”

Added the Rockies’ José Iglesias: “He just says, ‘See ball, hit ball. See ball, hit ball.’ I’m like, Miggy, it’s a little more complicated than that.”

James McCann, the current Mets catcher, had just been called up by the Tigers in September 2014 when he got his first assignment for the Miguel Cabrera hitting school. After Cabrera rolled over a ground ball to third base in his first at-bat of a game against the Twins, he found McCann in the dugout and said, “Go watch my film and tell me what I did wrong.” McCann assumed he wasn’t serious; a teammate assured McCann that he was. McCann went to the clubhouse and cued up side-by-side video of Cabrera’s groundout and his most recent home run. He ran the tape back and forth a few times, then returned to the dugout. He told Cabrera he’d changed his posture in the box — he looked too stiff.

“You’re right,” Cabrera replied. “I’ll fix it.”

Later, McCann got the feeling someone was looking at him. He glanced up. Cabrera was in the on-deck circle: “Watch this,” he said. Cabrera leaned back, correcting his stance, and took a dry swing. He stepped into the batter’s box and did it again. Then he turned on a two-strike pitch and launched it into the left-field seats. He pointed to the dugout and circled the bases.

“I’m thinking, Man, what’s with this guy?” McCann recalled. “He’s different.”

By then, McCann realized Cabrera had known all along what he’d done wrong. He didn’t need help. He was teaching the rookie about his hitting process.

The pitcher on the other end of that homer was Trevor May, a rookie starter for the Twins at the time. May, now a Mets reliever, said of facing Cabrera for the first time that it was a “that’s when you realize you’re in the majors” moment: “You just know he’s playing a different game than you.” May watched from across the division as Cabrera collected four batting titles. Even as injuries mounted and Cabrera’s contact skills deteriorated, he remained an infuriating at-bat.

“When you have your best stuff, and he knows you have your best stuff, he probably won’t hit you hard, but he’ll foul off a few pitches just to be annoying,” May said, laughing. “Then he’ll give you a thumbs up to say, ‘You’re really good, man. But you’re not going to dominate me.’ I always loved that about him.”

Cabrera’s in-game adjustments are the stuff of legend around the league. After McCann and May told that story in the Mets clubhouse, Francisco Lindor jumped in with another. It was June 2015, Lindor’s first series in the majors. Cleveland’s Danny Salazar blew a fastball past Cabrera for strike three, and on the next pitch Cabrera saw he drilled a fastball off the batter’s eye at Comerica Park. Two days later, he hit another to the same spot off Corey Kluber.

“It was one of the most impressive things I’d ever seen,” Lindor said.

Avisaíl García, now with the Marlins, remembers a conversation he had with Cabrera in the dugout during Game 4 of the 2012 ALCS. The Yankees’ CC Sabathia had fed Cabrera a mix of fastballs in on the hands and slow curveballs below the zone, and in his first two at-bats Cabrera had just missed barreling the ball, flying out both times. Before his third at-bat, Cabrera told García, “If he throws me that little cutter inside, I’m going to hit a homer. Watch.”

“I said, ‘We’ll see,’” García recalled, “but inside I was like nah.”

Sabathia’s first offering in Cabrera’s third at-bat came in at 91 mph and two inches off the plate inside. Cabrera deposited it 10 rows deep in left field.

“Unbelievable,” García said. “That’s the confidence he has.”

It’s not just hitters who have learned from Cabrera’s ability to make on-the-fly changes. On days when Tigers starter Casey Mize isn’t pitching, Cabrera will tell him about in-game adjustments he’s making — giving the hitter’s side to pitch sequencing. Once, Cabrera explained the opposing team was hammering him with inside fastballs early in the count. Cabrera wanted to go the other way but couldn’t. So he sat on the inside pitch. “He turned on one and hit it about 400 feet foul,” Mize said. Cabrera didn’t see another inside pitch that series.

For all that’s been written and said about Cabrera’s hitting heroics over the years, no part of his routine has drawn more attention than his batting practice. Ask around about it and you’ll hear variations of the same story: Cabrera waiting until the opposing team is watching, then homering on consecutive pitches to right field, center and left. One version has each homer landing in the second deck. Another has him hitting both foul poles for good measure.

The Marlins’ Miguel Rojas, a fellow Venezuelan, trains with Cabrera in Hialeah, Fla., each offseason. When Cabrera hits, Rojas said, everyone walking by stops to watch: “He’s a rock star.” Rojas told the story on “The Chris Rose Rotation” of a crowd gathering as Cabrera hit one day last year. When longtime MLB infielder Freddy Galvis arrived for his turn in the cages, Cabrera paused.

“Did you bring your $50?” Cabrera asked.

“You think watching me hit is going to be free?” Cabrera joked.

But the truth about Cabrera’s pregame batting practice is it’s more than a power show. It’s an important part of his preparation, a component of the game he perfected years ago and plans to continue until he retires. He almost never pulls a ball. He sprays line drive after line drive to right field. One teammate said, “He’ll foul off three balls and go, ‘Hell yeah,’ because he’s right on it.” Another said it’s not the power that impresses most; it’s how professionally Cabrera approaches each swing, with efficient mechanics and consistent crisp contact.

“It’s something special to watch,” the Tigers’ Jonathan Schoop said.

“It looks like a machine,” said Tigers outfielder Robbie Grossman. “It’s the same trajectory, same speed, one after another. It’s like, you’re not human.”

As Grossman spoke, Cabrera walked in and sat at his locker, situated directly next to Grossman’s in the Tigers spring-training clubhouse in Lakeland, Fla. Cabrera overheard the conversation about his batting practice sessions and started to laugh. “Why are we talking so much about BP?” he asked after shrugging away a few questions about it. “I work on everything I can in BP so I can prepare for my game. It’s just BP. The game is so much different.”

To him, it’s just BP.

To those watching, it’s a master class.

Last August, the Tigers returned to Detroit for a two-series homestand with Cabrera sitting at 499 home runs. The script was set for Cabrera to make history at home. The average crowd at Comerica Park over those six home games was 25,580, more than double the average attendance the rest of the year.

“Every seat was filled,” Tigers outfielder Akil Baddoo said. “I was looking around. Everyone was standing up with their flashlights. It was a beautiful sight. The announcer’s like, ‘Now up to bat, Miguel Cabrera,’ and everyone is screaming. But once he comes up to bat it’s silent. I’m literally hearing conversations in FaceTime calls 10 rows back. I’m like, ‘Yo, this is crazy.’”

Baddoo was a 22-year-old rookie. When he was learning to walk, Cabrera was already in pro ball. After one of Cabrera’s bids for No. 500 died in front of the warning track for a harmless flyout, the crowd oohed and Cabrera trotted back to the dugout. Baddoo asked him, “Miggy, how are you feeling right now?”

“Papi, I’m nervous,” Cabrera replied. “My heart is beating fast. When I come up to bat, (the fans) scream, and then they go quiet. Just keep it normal, man.”

Cabrera didn’t homer at home. No. 500 came in the Tigers’ next series, at Rogers Centre in Toronto, off left-hander Steven Matz. Cabrera stayed with an off-speed pitch away and did with it what he’s done since he was a 7-year-old kid taking batting practice in Maracay: He hit a rocket to the opposite field.

Nick Groke and Cody Stavenhagen contributed reporting.

(Top image: John Bradford / The Athletic; Photos: Ezra Shaw, Leon Halip, Mark Cunningham / Getty Images)