Watching Detroit Tigers' Miguel Cabrera's slow decline can remind us of our own mortality

Miguel Cabrera’s greatness has made the last seven years tough to watch. Mostly because he hasn’t been great in any of them.

Or even merely good.

And when he takes his final at-bat this weekend at Comerica Park — he's scheduled to play in all three of the Detroit Tigers’ games against Cleveland — the weight of his prodigious falloff will be as much of the story as his all-time talent.

Not that we’ll hear about the last seven years. Not that we should. He deserves a weekend of pomp and celebration — all-timers don’t come around often.

And so, we’ll replay the vintage moments, and revel in the sendoffs, and watch him take Mariano Rivera deep at Yankee Stadium one last time. That home run happened in the top of the ninth, by the way, with two strikes and two outs and a man on base, and when Cabrera golfed Rivera’s cutter over the centerfield wall, the famed Yankees’ closer mouthed: “Wow.”

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Wow, indeed.

Wow is the easy part, though.

Wow is the Triple Crown and the opposite-field homers and the way he’d bait pitchers into throwing what he wanted. At his apex, he was Tony Gwynn with power, Fred Astaire with a liquid swing, a baseball savant who logged every at-bat in the back eddy of his brain and could then recall them in 8K technicolor.

Wow is the transcendent stretch of baseball he played from 2009-2016, an eight-year run that is among the best in baseball history and will make him a first-ballot Hall of Famer.

"He is on his own little shelf," Ron Gardenhire once told me. "There is no one else like him."

And this was when Gardenhire was managing the Minnesota Twins, not the Tigers.

But the distance from wow, from that player, the fearsome force who inspired comparisons to the Ruths and Gehrigs, as former Tigers general manager Dave Dombrowski did during a particularly otherworldly tear of Cabrera’s in 2013, to the player who will smile and wave to the crowd this weekend is almost unfathomable.

Legacies get messy in that distance, and greatness can get lost in the shadow of decline. That Cabrera’s drop happened so suddenly complicates how we will remember him even more.

One season he was worthy of an intentional walk, a 38-home run-hitting, .300-plus machine smiling as he danced through the record books.

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And the next?

He couldn’t hit .250.

And while he had a respectable season two years later, he’d lost his power, his bat-speed and his aura in the batter’s box. He'd done enough by then to be considered a breathing legend, and you didn’t have to go far to hear the reverence among his coaches, teammates and peers.

But it was clear by 2019 he wasn’t the same player. The next four years were worse, and no matter how many stories of his mentorship in the clubhouse leaked out, his statistical value didn’t come close to his paycheck.

For many, that cold calculus was reason to resent the aging star or, more precisely, resent the organization that paid him for what he’d done instead of what he was likely to do. And his presence, however jaunty and fun on the field, remained a reminder of a rebuild going nowhere, anchored by a very large foot from the past.

None of this was Cabrera’s fault, of course.

Injuries ruined whatever chance he had of aging gracefully and no one would pass up an eight-year, $248 million contract.

When he signed it in March of 2014, he — and the Tigers — figured there were at least a few years left of his prime; he’d just come off consecutive MVPs. They were right. He did. He had three more seasons of elite baseball.

But the eight-year deal didn’t kick in until 2016, which means the franchise got one productive year from Cabrera — as the World Series window slammed shut — for essentially a quarter of a billion dollars. The math is harsh that way, and as much as Cabrera earned the upcoming party, as great as he was, his hits-to-wage ratio the last seven years shade the retrospective.

Then again, money isn’t the arbiter of human achievement. There is no formula to fully define the value of someone who compels you to stop what you are doing and watch or listen.

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Cabrera was appointment viewing and listening at his best, and that best lasted for almost a decade. And even if you insist on balancing his career by balancing the ledger of production, he gave the Tigers nine years of sublime, at times unprecedented, baseball and seven years of relative mediocrity.

Is that a fair trade-off?

Yeah, I’d say so. Cabrera was the offensive centerpiece to this region’s baseball renaissance, and helped make nine consecutive summers joyful and thrilling for those who love this game and this team.

How do you put a price on that?

You don’t, which is why Cabrera spent this past season getting showered with gifts in every opposing ballpark he played in to commemorate his career. And why he’s an all-timer's send-off this weekend.

Because if you like watching a human being trying to hit a baseball, few have ever done it better, or more spectacularly.

Yet watching that same human being struggle to do the thing made them a shooting star is not just difficult, but even painful, especially when the struggle lasts so long. Because their greatness, however brief, acts as a temporary escape from mortality. And its loss reminds that immortality is fleeting.

For all of us.

Contact Shawn Windsor: 313-222-6487 or swindsor@freepress.com. Follow him @shawnwindsor.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Detroit Tigers' Miguel Cabrera: All-time talent with a complex legacy