PicoBlog

As the Detroit Tigers return home for the final week of the season, we have also reached the final conclusion of Miguel Cabrera’s baseball career. This week, over six home games in Detroit, Miggy will play his final games in the MLB, the conclusion of a nearly 2,800-game-long career spanning 21 seasons. With his retirement will go one of the greatest hitters there ever was, a two-time MVP, four-time batting champion, and the only Triple Crown winner after the year 1970. He was an extraordinary player and a gift for all baseball fans to watch for this many years.

Miguel Cabrera also meant something more for baseball fans in Michigan and his retirement takes with him something powerful. Though Cabrera was not on the 2006 team that ushered in the renaissance period of Detroit Tigers baseball in the 21st century, he was that era’s greatest player and most recognizable face, the fan favorite. Yes, Justin Verlander was exceptional, and Max Scherzer briefly got there before leaving the club… you can make a reasonable case that both had better careers and belong higher on an all-time MLB players list than Cabrera due to their longevity. But from 2008-2016? Cabrera was the best, and his nature as a position player engendered a greater closeness with fans.

He was on our TVs playing the game every single night for six straight months, achieving offensive feats some never thought possible. And most of all, while Verlander and Scherzer exited Detroit during the tear-down of the once-great Tigers, Cabrera’s long-term contract kept him at Comerica Park. For years after 2016, even as Cabrera was just as much a reduced shell of his former self as the team was of its former glory, he was still a recognizable face to bring fans to the ballpark, scratching his way to 500 HRs and 3,000 hits. Cabrera is the last remaining piece of a certain era of Tigers history and as we watch Cabrera leave the field for the final time this Sunday, he will be taking that history with him.

As a lifelong Tigers fan, but someone who could not have been more of an addict during that period of time, saying farewell to Cabrera is hard, as I imagine it is for many people. But I knew I had to do it, I had to write something about a baseball player that I’ve owned a jersey of for well over a decade now, that I had posters of in my bedroom, that gave me so much.

We haven’t had this moment much in Detroit sports. Steve Yzerman, Pavel Datsyuk, and Henrik Zetterberg all left quietly without proper send-offs. The Pistons haven’t had a player worthy of one in ages and all the Goin’ To Work pieces went their separate ways without retiring a Piston. Calvin Johnson and Barry Sanders? Well, we were just lucky to get a faxed-in statement from one of them.

What Miguel Cabrera gives us this week, a chance to say goodbye ahead of time, on our own terms, is special. A rare ending for an even rarer talent. As I searched my thoughts and watched endless highlight clip videos of Cabrera in the past few weeks, attempting to formulate what I wanted to get into writing, I stumbled onto something. I didn’t want to write about how great of a player Miguel Cabrera was or go share a ranking of his 10 greatest hits, I wanted to write about what Cabrera meant to me. I wanted to write about the emotions I had been feeling with the regards to his retirement and reflect on the days when Miguel Cabrera’s next at-bat was the most important thing in my life. I wanted to dig deep into the nostalgia and tell you about the legend that was and just maybe, learn something about myself.

[Getty Images]

I was a Detroit Tigers fan before Miguel Cabrera ever suited up for the team, dating back to ~2006. My road to Tigers fandom wasn’t terribly exciting. My parents (and by extension, aunts and uncles) were of the perfect generation for the Roar of ‘84, the sort of people who felt it was their duty to take me as infant to the bleachers of Tiger Stadium during its final season to say I was there. My family has always loved sports and I was destined to pick it up too. I just had to get old enough and the Tigers had to become good enough. Like most Tigers fans of my generation, that was 2006, the meteoric rise to contention that the team engineered over that magical summer, and the electric playoff run (well, at least pre-World Series) that extinguished the memories of their September collapse that cost the team the AL Central.

I remember those playoffs, my appearance in the stands at the Magglio Ordoñez walk-off home-run, and some fleeting memories of the World Series. I remember collecting those “Who’s Your Tiger?” promotional trading cards that The Detroit Free Press included in copies of the paper in 2007 and have distinct memories of particular games from that season I attended. Sitting and doing jigsaw puzzles in my grandparents’ house as the music from the evening Tigers broadcast played on the television in the background is a childhood image etched in my mind.

2006 and 2007 was my road to fandom, teaching me the ropes and giving me the tools to appreciate the talent that was coming in Miguel Cabrera. I didn’t think much of it when he arrived, too young to truly understand the heist that the Tigers had pulled off. Over his first five seasons in the MLB, Miguel Cabrera’s OPS (on-percentage + slugging percentage) was .929, or 43% better than the average player in the league. This was his period in Miami with the then-Florida Marlins, from age 20-24. Everyone old enough to grasp it knew how incredible of a player Dave Dombrowski had finagled out of notorious art dealer Jeffrey Loria’s grasp.

Cabrera’s time in Miami was littered with iconic moments, his walk-off HR in his first MLB game and the World Series homer off Roger Clemens, as the Marlins won the second of their two bizarre championships. Cabrera was outrageously good for such a young age, 5th in MVP voting in 2005 at age 22, when American-born college players are likely still in the minor leagues at a comparable age. He was a skinnier kid then, thin and svelte, not too far removed from his shortstop days but by then patrolling either third base or the outfield. The prodigious power had not quite developed, though he was still capable of crushing a baseball, averaging right around 30 HRs per 162 games over his time with the Marlins.

But that pure, sweet, 80-grade hit tool gifted to him by the gods, that was there from the start. He hit .294 his first full season in the MLB and then jumped up to .323 and then .339 (with a .430 OBP) in 2006. He smacked 43 doubles in ‘05 and followed it up with 50 in ‘06, falling just short of 200 hits both seasons. 27 intentional walks in 2006 may have played a role. Cabrera scored and drove in more than 105 runs both seasons and earned his first two Silver Sluggers. 2007 was a slight come-down, but you know you’re already a superstar when a .320 batting average, .965 OPS, and 34 HRs is a “slight come-down”. Miguel Cabrera was a perennial All-Star and one of the very best players in baseball before I ever knew him. That I got to know him as a player on my favorite team is even luckier.

[@Tigers on Twitter]

Miguel Cabrera’s first three years in Detroit were incredibly strong offensive seasons, but they aren’t the years that I want to focus on in this piece. He led the AL in homers in 2008 with 37, hitting one in his first game as a Tiger, won AL Player of the Month in July, and reached the 1,000 hit mark. He also led the league with 338 total bases. In 2009, Cabrera hit .324 with a .942 OPS and took fourth for the MVP, 30+ HRs and 100 RBI again. In 2010, he upped that average to .328, crossed the 1.000 OPS threshold for the first time in his career, led the AL in RBI with 126 (and in OPS+ at 178), hit 38 HRs, and finished as the AL MVP runner-up. He was extremely good.

The team around him wasn’t, though. Their 2008 season was a flop, as Mike Ilitch’s pursuit of the oldest and most overpriced roster in the MLB blew up in his face as the team had one the very worst pitching staffs in the league. Kenny Rogers taught us that 42 was indeed too old to be an MLB starter, Justin Verlander had an early-career stepback, Dontrelle Willis completed the meltdown he’d begun in Florida, and Nate Robertson? Don’t even ask about it.

The 2009 team was better, from 74 to 86 wins and a near-win of a a wretched AL Central. It was an odd team, a hodgepodge of players that was still reasonably heavy on 2006 guys but also was beginning to age towards the 2010s teams that would be among the best in baseball. In other words, Magglio Ordoñez and Curtis Granderson were still there, but so were Cabrera, Verlander, and Rick Porcello as three of the team’s most important pieces. The season ended in the excruciating Game 163, a tremendous back-and-forth affair. It went from 3-0 Tigers (Cabrera’s two-run HR getting it going) to 4-3 Twins to 5-4 Tigers in the 10th to eventually, 6-5 Minnesota in the bottom of the 12th.

The final week of the 2009 season was Cabrera’s darkest hour as a pro baseball player. While the Tigers were in their final-week collapse, Cabrera had gotten into a domestic incident with his wife in the early hours of October 3, after a night of heavy drinking. Police were called to the home and his BAC was revealed to be 0.26. Charges were never filed but after the season ended, Cabrera was admitted to an alcohol abuse treatment center where he spent three months. [It didn’t totally solve the problem, as Cabrera’s alcohol demons persisted for some time after, being arrested in 2011 while intoxicated, though that would be his final run-in with authorities.]

The 2010 team Cabrera returned to that next spring was as mediocre as you can be, finishing a perfect 81-81. They were still a mishmash roster, including that one weird year Johnny Damon was on the squad. The team didn’t give Cabrera a lot of help, or many memories for me to proudly recount to you. The most famous 2010 Detroit Tigers moment was the Armando Galarraga imperfect perfect game, a remarkable tale of sportsmanship. On the field, there wasn’t a ton else. Joe Maddon IBB’d Miguel Cabrera relentlessly in a July Detroit-Tampa series that humiliated the overmatched Brennan Boesch, radicalizing Dave Dombrowski into getting Cabrera protection in the batting order.

The Tigers teams of 2008-10 were middling teams, ones that existed when you needed entertainment in summer downtime, but nothing to grab your attention. And you would not be chastised for forgetting about them entirely once it was time for football season. For me, they were passing interests in my mind and far from must-watch content. It is the teams that followed that grabbed my attention and as a result, left an indelible mark on my life.

[Your author outside the Comerica Park gates at the Game 3 of the 2012 World Series]

If you comb back through my camera roll (no, not you Mike Babcock) from 2012-14 era, or my mom’s Facebook posting history, you’d get the impression that all my family did in the summer was go to Tigers games. That impression wouldn’t be incorrect on an individual basis, but it was on a broader basis. We did plenty more than just go to Comerica Park in the summers, but those were the big touchstone moments that were notable then and I hold onto now. We didn’t have season tickets or anything, but we did go to a fair number of games.

Across those years, I got hours worth of stories to tell of things I saw attending Tigers games. We got suckers thrown at us by Joaquin Benoit when we sat next to the Tigers’ dugout and were encroached on by groupies in Tiger-striped leggings. We were at Comerica Park in the playoffs when the lights went out, when it felt like 1,000º outside and the plastic/metal seat combo cooked any exposed skin you touched it with, and when it was cold for Opening Day. We chased PAWS around Comerica Park, so that my mascot-loving brother could get his hat signed by his favorite buddy.

We saw walk offs, Austin Jackson get pulled from the middle of the game because he’d been traded for David Price, and a potbelly’d man with an unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt try to explain to us the vintage Tigers logos dotting his shirt. Two frantic attempts to see history unfold in the fall (Justin Verlander get a 25th win in 2011; Tigers clinch the AL Central in 2014) went awry when neither event happened the night we were at the stadium and yes, we left the stadium early for the Rajai Davis walk-off grand slam and heard it on the radio at a gas station off I-94.

Sometimes it was just me and my dad. Sometimes it was me, my dad, and my brother. Sometimes it was the four of us. Sometimes it was with my aunts/uncles, my grandparents, or some of my cousins. They were always family outings, for the Tigers were a family institution in my childhood. Just ask the 14-year-old me trying to discern an 18-inch television screen in the corner of the building where my cousin’s wedding was held in July 2013 to see some of that night’s Tigers game.

The Tigers went from a team I cared about if I was bored in the summer to a team I lived and breathed on because in 2011, they suddenly got a lot better. Miguel Cabrera didn’t really change, he was always that good. Sure, a .344 average in 2011 to win his first batting title was better than previous years but his power numbers were down and he finished *only* 5th in AL MVP voting. It was the rest of the team that improved dramatically and propelled the Tigers to grab ahold of a bad AL Central. Justin Verlander ascended to all-time heights with his 24-5, 2.40 ERA, 0.92 WHIP, 250 IP, Cy Young/MVP season, and was joined by Doug Fister going God Mode after the trade deadline. Victor Martinez was the protection the Tigers needed and Delmon Young began his playoff heroics.

It wasn’t until the summer of 2011 that the Tigers grabbed my attention, really consolidating it in August as they began to pull away from the lackluster Cleveland Indians. Getting to see your team win a lot is fun, and it’s even more fun when they win like this:

I remember that one like it was yesterday, a hot as hell late summer afternoon in Michigan, my dad and I golfing and checking the score on the phone. Getting done with the round right in time for the 9th inning, the gray-colored SUV with black seats too hot to step into as soon as we got to the parking lot but I insisting I do anyway. I was fine searing my thighs if it meant I could hear Dan Dickerson call the final plays. And that play at the plate, to preserve the Valverde perfect save streak. Man.

We hosted a party in the basement for Game 1 of the ALDS against the Yankees, a game that was rained out before any real action happened. On a happier note, my grandparents brought me a Verlander pin, one I still have stashed away all these years later. The Tigers somehow won that series despite not great pitching from Verlander, with the heroes being the most unlikely of all, Don Kelly and Delmon Young with solo shots in the decisive Game 5 in the Bronx. The ALCS against Texas didn’t go as well thanks to GOAT Tiger Killer Nelson Cruz but I went into the offseason with unabashed optimism, which dipped a bit when we learned of Victor Martinez’s injury, only to be flipped around by the Prince Fielder signing, the most electric offseason transaction in the past two decades of Detroit sports history.

2012 was my start of Tigers Addiction, from the first days of April to the last days of October. I rode the rollercoaster through all the ups and downs of a largely frustrating regular season that saw the Tigers play with their food and not clinch the AL Central until the final days, despite the only competition being a bad White Sox team. It was all worth it to enjoy Miguel Cabrera’s Triple Crown season, .330, 44 HR, 139 RBI. The achievement is flawed because batting average and RBI are not the most useful stats, but it was still neat to do. Winning the batting title and the home run crown in the same year is an impressive enough achievement. His top highlight from that season was a walk-off against Cleveland, which I want to let Dan Dickerson handle:

It was the first summer that I was old enough to stay home alone with the responsibility of babysitting my brother and most of what I could think of was baseball. Weather was good? Go outside and throw him batting practice. Tigers were playing? We were inside on the couch watching. I was teaching him all the positions, how to hit live pitching as a 5-year-old, and all the basics of the game. He was a lefty after all, what better sport is there to use your natural born advantage as a southpaw than baseball? (I should point out we were both proud members of the Detroit Tigers Kids Club too).

The 2012 playoffs were a baseball playoffs like any other, the cocaine highs and the depressive lows. We Tigers fans rode Valverde’s meltdown in the 9th to blow Game 4 against Oakland into JV’s ultimate That Dawg In Him 122 pitch complete game shutout in the decisive Game 5. In the days before smart phone sports video streaming had really proliferated, I listened to the final outs on a radio call I could get onto my iPhone 4S while laying in bed supposed to be “asleep”. As far as I can remember, that’s the last Tigers playoff game where I went to bed before it was over.

The ALCS was just bliss, a good vibes/bad vibes wacko Game 1 followed by a steamrolling in Games 2-4. Game 4 was nothing but a sweet coronation of the Tigers. Our boys had completely and thoroughly whipped the Yankees’ ass, the sweetest feeling in the world. The next day, the day coming off of seeing your team win the pennant mixing with a day-off from school spent palling downtown Ann Arbor with a couple buddies, is still one of the greatest days of my life and I’m not afraid to say it.

Of course, you know what happened next in the World Series. Verlander melted down in Game 1 and more importantly, the Tigers couldn’t hit worth a lick the entire series. They went 20 straight innings without scoring a run, which included Game 3 we attended (the most interesting thing from that game was my uncle and I procuring a rally towel from a squabbling married couple who decided to have an all-out pre-divorce verbal brawl from the seats of the World Series). It was cold and boring as hell, a slow and painful, yet certain demise.

[Another Tiger game sibling picture]

Everything I’ve told you in this piece has really just built to this point, 2013. When I first sat down to write, I thought about giving each stage of Cabrera’s time with the Tigers equal weight but eventually I realized that I had the most to say about 2013 and it was this point in time stuck in my brain. Something about 2013 and the summer of 2013 specifically, how it weaves between Miguel Cabrera and my own life, has remained imbedded in my mind.

The thing about Miguel Cabrera’s 2013 season is it was the best year of his career. No it wasn’t the Triple Crown season but in nearly every facet, Cabrera was a better hitter in 2013 than he had been in 2012. Especially so through the end of August. On August 29, 2013, Cabrera injured himself sliding into second against the A’s and from that point forward, he was not the same hitter. His bat-to-ball skills were still there but the power was gone, foreshadowing the problems that would plague his final 10 years.

But let me tell you about Cabrera before that… he was the best hitter I ever saw. He was right there with the very best post-Steroid Era offensive seasons, next to Judge’s 2022 or Pujols’ peak or the heights Trout would achieve in the late 2010s. That summer of 2013, Cabrera was on another level, even from what he’d done the previous year. Here was his stat line through 126 games: .359/.450/.683/1.132, 43 HR, 130 RBI. He was clubbing bombs on a near-60 HR pace, yet also maintaining an average that would be among the very best post-Tony Gwynn seasons in MLB history. He was getting on base at over a .450 clip and oh yeah, he was basically 1:1 strikeouts to walks.

There was nothing Cabrera didn’t do well at the plate that summer, a maestro of the truest form. He could crush the baseball to all fields, prodigious pull power, monstrous oomph to dead center, and plenty of mustard for oppo too. But Miggy was such a smart hitter too, the sort of player who made me believe there really is something special about hitting in RBI situations. If there was a runner on third he needed to bring home, Cabrera was more than happy to simply poke a fastball the opposite way for a solid single to bring in the run. He saw the plate well and knew the strike zone like the back of his hand. He didn’t chase after garbage.

Above all else, Cabrera seemed to be a real life baseball superhero. Every time the Tigers needed a big hit from Cabrera, they got it. That period in early August 2013 was supernatural, the stuff of gods. The Tigers embarked on a 12-game winning streak (and won 16 of 17), including a four game sweep of the next-closest AL Central rival Indians in Cleveland. The Miggy moments from that period are innumerable. First he ripped the heart of Danny Salazar right out of his body as an embarrassed Salazar realized that the nuke he just gave up was indeed, not a pop up:

Then two days later he made the greatest relief pitcher in MLB history tip his cap to him after an epic AB:

And then one week later, he walked off the Kansas City Royals at home:

By the time he bludgeoned the Mets for two more HRs in a three-game sweep a week later, you could have convinced me that this portly Venezuelan was Christ in the flesh. There was nothing he couldn’t do.

Sports is about and brings to you a lot of beautiful things, even in the dark times, but there is something special about getting to watch one of the best to ever do it at the apex of his powers. And I’m not merely talking about turning on the TV in the next month and watching Patrick Mahomes play football or Connor McDavid play hockey. That’s fun and tremendous yes, but getting one of those level players to play on your poor, unsuspecting team that you were already planning to watch every night? That’s when you feel like the luckiest kid on the face of the earth.

The other thing about watching an all-time talent at his zenith is you begin to suspend disbelief and think that this will go on forever. After all, he’d been an elite hitter every year I’d seen Cabrera in Detroit. Why would he ever not be? Cabrera held the entire MLB pitching profession in the palm of his hand that summer of 2013, a king ruling over his subjects, with the Triple Crown still affixed to his head. Invincible, immortal, whatever term you want to use, I fully believed it.

What has remained trapped in my mind is some sort of feeling I’ve had connecting Miguel Cabrera’s world-crushing offensive ability that summer of 2013 to the childhood innocence and those idyllic Michigan summer afternoons where nothing else mattered, just baseball, 82º sunshine, and pure happiness. More specifically, they’re connected because of how certain I was in that brief moment of time that it would last forever. And also how they seemed to leave me together, as my life changed when I entered high school at the end of the summer.

If I sit back in a chair and close my eyes, I can still picture it now, going out into the yard with my brother, playing catch. Picking up a bat, taking one good Miggy-sized hack and remembering why I was never a good baseball player. Jogging around the yard as the cool summer breeze ran through my hair, dreaming of what trade deadline acquisition Dave Dombrowski could scheme up or the image of our valiant heroes on the diamond hoisting the Commissioner’s Trophy in October.

Everything on my mind to worry about seemed so far away. I’d be starting high school in a few weeks, my first new school since I’d started formal schooling nine years prior, new classmates, new teachers, new building, a whole new routine. I was leaving the only academic world I could really remember and as a change-averse person, I was mostly terrified. And what lay beyond that? College, romance, adulthood, a job, it may have been clearly visible on the horizon, but so long as I thought of baseball and sat down to watch Miguel Cabrera, it all seemed a million miles away. I didn’t want to grow up, I didn’t want to leave the confines of familiarity and a world where Miguel Cabrera wasn’t the best hitter on earth.

2013 was a summer I mostly spent dreaming out baseball in that limbo between conquering middle school and the uncertainty of high school. We went to games in Detroit and even briefly went baseball Deadhead and followed the Tigers to Cleveland for that early August series I clipped earlier. I watched games on TV, scrutinized trade deadline candidates, tracked stats online and even yes, began to find my future self as a writer. My dad drew up a website for me to throw sports articles up on and these were some of the very first things I ever wrote about sports. The Tigers and Miguel Cabrera were that inspiration.

Many of those writings I still have. Are any of them good? Not really. But just as I sit here now and write about a past me, 2013 me was sitting there and punching keys with his fingers and ever so slightly jotting down the course of his future self. I still have a number of the google docs I wrote them in, bearing extremely 14-year-old sports fan headlines like “He needs to go! What to do with Al Alburquerque”. Things that watching a Dombrowski bullpen every night would make you do.

That summer of 2013 gave me freedom to explore sportswriting more deeply and to dream big about baseball. It also gave me time to bond further with my closest relatives. Frequent phone calls with my uncle made me a smarter baseball fan. I tracked the standings meticulously and wanted the Tigers to get first place in the AL. I sweated out the 2013 All-Star Game until the AL won, ensuring that the league’s victor have home field for the World Series. That would be the Tigers, of course. How could it not be, with Cabrera this immortal?

Eventually school time came and all that freedom was over. So was Miguel Cabrera’s rampage. The injury he suffered damaged the remainder of his season, hitting just one homer in his final 22 games. The team was fine and wrapped up the division, but that aura of invincibility was gone. He was fine to leg out a single or two a game, but the mighty power had vanished. Now, Cabrera looking ordinary wasn’t going to stop my Detroit Tigers addiction. No way. Starting at a new high school with 140 classmates I’d never seen before, I was about to need it more than ever.

The transition to high school was difficult for me, meeting new people and getting adjusted to the new surroundings. For a time, I wanted to quit and go back to middle school. Most of all I just wanted to watch Tigers baseball. The escapism of coming home from school and flipping on Fox Sports Detroit was essential. Have a boring class? Stare down at your notebook and scribble meaningless baseball stats, current standings, or the rotations of the playoff contenders.

The Tigers were the lifeboat I needed, not just because I loved baseball but because the team was so good and seemed so certain to my dream-ridden heart to win it all. They had great starting pitching, with a new Cy Young in Max Scherzer, and a batting order loaded with great hitters. Sure, the bullpen wasn’t elite but how big of a deal could that be? We had the Cy Young and the MVP on the same team and that Cy Young wasn’t even the guy who’d won the Cy Young two years earlier. The Tigers didn’t mess around and led the division wire-to-wire. This was the year. All-in.

Of course, it wasn’t. Needless to say, we don’t need to re-hash how it all went down. Beating Oakland in the ALDS again, in a Game 5 on the road for the third straight year, was really damn cool. The rest of it against Boston, the Big Papi grand slam, watching my team get shutout in the playoffs in a second straight game I attended in person, and the Victorino grand slam, I can do without that. The bullpen wasn’t close to good enough. By the time that series had wrapped up, the devastation had done its damage. Damn.

Your author and Miguel Cabrera [2014]

Baseball has a funny way of taking it all from us so quickly. You watch a team for six months and then in the span of a week or less, it’s all over. In Miguel Cabrera’s case, it was taken from us that afternoon in late August 2013. He’d have great seasons again after that, winning the batting title again in 2015 and 38 HRs in 2016, but he was never that level of good again. I continued to admire the greatness of Miggy for years after, but I never again thought he was invincible. I was still a child, but as a high schooler, I never again had that level of childish innocence.

I didn’t stop caring or loving baseball then. I was back in spring 2014 for another season, hyped up and ready to go. The 2014 season was a solid ride, with the additions of Ian Kinsler, JD Martinez, and David Price being special wrinkles. Along the way I got to attend a charity event in the summer where I got to have my picture taken with Miguel Cabrera. I believed in that team going into September and then they got swept by Baltimore. Swept by Chris Tillman, Wei-Yin Chen, and Bud fucking Norris. This stupid sport sometimes.

Everyone knew the window was closing by then, but it didn’t hit me until years later that it had closed. Scherzer walked in the offseason and signed arguably the best free agent signing of the 21st century with the Nationals, continuing what he’d started in Detroit to become one of the best pitchers of his era, while Aníbal Sanchez and Victor Martinez both began sharp declines. Verlander and Cabrera both missed big chunks of 2015 with injury and the team sold at the deadline. Dave Dombrowski exited as team GM and we were stuck with Al Avila, whose reign of terror over the Tigers organization would ultimately destroy the franchise in the short and long term.

Cabrera and Verlander would bounce back in 2016, Miggy hitting .316 with 38 HRs and 108 RBI. They weren’t quite enough to get the Tigers into the playoffs though, as Al Avila’s disastrous contracts to Jordan Zimmermann and Mark Lowe alone were enough to cost the team a wild card spot. On the final day of the 2016 season, the Tigers were eliminated from the playoffs and with the core even more long-in-the-tooth, reality was setting in.

By 2017 it was over. Cabrera, the team, all of it. Miggy’s great hitting prowess had vanished, batting average to a career-worst .249 and the first-time he was a below average hitter per OPS+. Verlander was still good but the poorly constructed roster was not, unable to stomach an age-related Cabrera decline. In the summer they sold off pieces at the deadline, unloading JD Martinez, Justin Upton, and ultimately, Justin Verlander, in three disastrous trades. By the time I started college in the first week of September, I was aware of the situation. It was a rebuild and the Tigers were not going to be good for a long time, thanks to a neglected farm system. Over.

The principles of sports say that in every competition, there are winners and there are losers. One team should be crowned as the victors and bathed in adulation, while the other team ought to hang their heads and contemplate why things went wrong. As we come to the end of Miguel Cabrera’s career and with it, the last standing symbol of the great early 2010s Tigers that were, we are faced with the central cognitive dissonance of the era: the joy and the warm fuzzies that those teams and players brought us juxtaposed with the dark clouds of remembrance, reminding us that those teams failed in their goals.

The Detroit Tigers of the early 2010s didn’t win the World Series and Miguel Cabrera never brought a title to Detroit. Nothing about that statement is new or has changed, it’s been etched into stone since the summer of 2017. An objective fact of history. There are many reasons for it, the largest of which being that the roster never had a championship-worthy bullpen outside of *maybe* 2011. Of course, hitting at all in several decisive games in 2013 and 2014, not to mention the entire 2012 World Series would’ve helped. You can toss randomness in there too because that’s applicable to all playoff baseball discussion.

Those Tigers teams were an imperfect roster with glaring holes and exceptional talents. They probably deserved to win a World Series with the talent they had, but it’s not like they piled up 100 win seasons. Two of the four AL Central titles they won were with <91 wins and clinched in the final days of the season. The most wins a Detroit team from that era amassed was 95. It’s not a befuddling mystery why a team with Verlander, Scherzer, and Cabrera didn’t win the World Series, in spite of viral baseball twitter posts making it out to be one. It doesn’t make it hurt any less either.

The reality that the Verlander/Cabrera era of Tigers teams didn’t win the World Series has been a peculiar arc of emotion in my mind. At first it was terror, 2014-16, when it started to enter my mind that the window could close without a championship happening. Then there was disillusionment and disgust in 2017 as the season (and era) fell apart, wanting it to all be over so it wouldn’t hurt as much and I wouldn’t have to think about it. After that came utter disappointment as the rebuild began, 2018-19, and the wound became sore.

And now? It’s mostly just there. It happened. They had great teams, they didn’t quite get it done, and then it ended. Will it always be disappointing? Sure, but I’ve found as time goes by that the disappointment isn’t that different than how disappointed I was when some minor detail of my life went awry at age 10. Nothing major, nothing that wakes me up screaming in the night.

I’d call it a scar, but I don’t think that’s the way to describe it. All those years I poured into watching and caring about and worshipping the Tigers didn’t scar me. It gave me a very great gift and memories I will cherish for the rest of my life. It’s why I’m writing this long piece about how (by all accounts) an imperfect and flawed human who gets paid to play a game changed me. Whenever you’re faced with a team like those early 2010s Tigers to look back on, you can bathe in the anguish of the rock bottom moments, the Big Papi grand slam playing on an endless loop in your mind, resorting to cold bitterness and a rebuke of it all. Or you can remember the vast majority of the moments of the ride, which were uniformly happy, where you got to watch all-time great players on a very good team win 55% of the time for six months a year for more than a few years in a row. I choose that path.

The Miguel Cabrera-led Tigers teams taught me so much and gave me even more. They were the glue that holds together so many formative moments and memories during a crucial time in my life, from age 12 to 17, and a magnetic force in the interpersonal relationships I formed with some of my closest family members. Great moments with my parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and brother. The Tigers didn’t get that role by just existing. They got it by winning, by capturing my fascination, and by making me and my relatives ultimately decide that they mattered. They got it by having players you couldn’t look away from, who brought magic into our lives and routines. They got it by having Miguel Cabrera at the height of his powers in the summer of 2013.

The more I thought about Miguel Cabrera and his legacy, the more understanding I started to get about players who play for one team for a long time and why they hold such sway over us. I observed it firsthand this summer, as Miggy has embarked on one last jolly display of hitting talent. Since the end of May he’s hit nearly .300, the power still completely gone and very little else he can do on a baseball field, but the great eye and hit tool that made him a legend have re-emerged from the seeming corpse that was wearing #24 and the Olde English D back at the start of the season. The flick of the wrist to deposit a baseball for a solid single into right field and the bloop hits that somehow always found a way to drop in all came roaring back, a final act still in the lineage of the 3,000 hit machine that he was.

It’s been a joy to watch Cabrera go out not as a carcass who is unplayable except for pity, but a haggard master living out his final days on his terms. He is only a sliver of the player he once was, but Cabrera is leaving us with a crystal clear image of his still-potent greatest asset: the genius hitting brain that made him the smartest hitter I will ever see in a Tigers uniform. Buried inside a human skeleton whose lower body has completely abandoned him and an upper body that doesn’t have much left either, that mastermind hitting brain is still in there and thankfully for us, he let us see it one last time this summer.

The result in doing so was harkening back to those images of his greatness and in that moment it dawned on me. We hold on to players who play for our team for a long time because for us, as fans, that player becomes a sort of reflection of the fan themselves. They become a constant in our lives and as they grow old in their careers, if you look at them and squint just hard enough, you not only see the great player they once were, you also see a reflection of your younger self in the mirror. For me, Cabrera has always been that touchstone and in seeing him regain a tiny bit of his old self this summer, I got to see one last glimpse at a younger me.

You can’t go back in time and change your past, or re-live it. You instead have to live with it and carry it forward. As I looked back at all the pictures and other physical reminders I hold of those early 2010s teams to write this piece, all of those emotions came back in one giant blast, a whirlwind of feeling but mostly nostalgia. Sometimes I wish I never left the summer of 2013. Deep down I know a part of me never did.

As the Tigers come back to Detroit this week for the final homestand, I’m not exactly sure what I’ll say or do to soak in the last moments of a Detroit sports icon who meant so much to me. I know that I’ll be watching the games and the memories will be in the front of my mind, that’s for sure. But what else? Maybe I’ll go by Comerica Park to see one of the games in person. I’ve thought about it. I hope Cabrera will slap a couple more solid singles the opposite way for old time’s sake.

I didn’t really know what the proper way to honor Miguel Cabrera was, other than writing this piece. Then I wrote the piece and I found it. This weekend I’m going to watch a Detroit Tigers game on TV and enjoy it for all of its benign ordinariness and believe again that one day, this team that’s broken my heart before will win the World Series. And then I’ll go outside, feel the air and let the breeze rush over me, pick up a baseball mitt and play catch with my brother. In other words, I’ll go back to 2013, just for one day.

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