In August of 2007 when Cameron Maybin made his Major League debut with the Detroit Tigers, he was the youngest player in Baseball.

Over his 15-year career he had 973 hits, but his first came off of none other than seven-time Cy Young winner Roger Clemens. In just his second game with the big team, Cameron singled for his first career hit. singled for his first career hit.

His next time at bat? Homer. The 20 year-old rookie singled and homered off of the 45 year-old veteran. So, naturally his third time at bat… hit by pitch! 

No one is saying Roger hit Maybin on purpose or anything, but that did happen to be Clemens’s first game back from a five-game suspension for hitting the Blue Jays’ Alex Rios in the back in what the Associated Press called “a testy series.”

Fifteen years later, Cameron made his broadcasting debut with the Yankees’ YES Network as a color commentator and with the MLB Network as an on-air contributor. It’s the MLB Network that has Cameron at this year’s World Series between the Philadelphia Phillies and the Houston Astros. As an on-air contributor, Maybin opines on several different shows on the network and it’s throle that is allowing him to move around covering different aspects of the series. 

Different aspects means doing things like predicting the Game One winner, or breaking down the Phillies’ Game Three, five-home run performance alongside Hall of Fame pitcher, Pedro Martinez.

Cameron incorrectly predicted an Astros win in Game One and correctly pointed out that four of the Phillies five homers in Game Three were hit off of breaking balls, by the way.

Covering the Astros in the World Series puts Maybin in an awkward position. As a player, he won his only World Series in 2017 as a member of the Astros. That, of course, is the year that Houston was caught in a major cheating scandal that rocked the sport.  

Picked up from the waiver wire, Maybin joined the Astros in August of that year where he played the rest of the season as well as six postseason games. There are a lot of haters circling that Astros championship like vultures, but Cam lets that roll right off. 

In February 2020, Maybin told The Detroit News, “Honestly, I feel like things that went on in the 2017 season with the Astros – which I was there for a month and some change – definitely doesn’t reflect how I approach the game and how I play the game.

“Hindsight is 20-20. It’s tough. Being in that locker room, knowing what was going on, we all could have said something about it.”

Analyzing the World Series games from behind the microphone, Cameron Maybin is definitely saying something now.

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