Every so often, there comes a team that is very good for a long stretch of time but is just not able to win a championship. The Detroit Tigers have been one of those teams since 2006 in Major League Baseball, but now their window of opportunity has officially closed.

Like all teams, star players get old and couldn’t play up their standard anymore. Miguel Cabrera has been placed on the disabled list for the first time in his career this season, and Justin Verlander is now a shell of what he used to be. Those were the two pillars of Detroit baseball for a long time and now they are falling apart. Furthermore, guys like Max Scherzer and other top talents have not been retained, making it that much more difficult for this team to stay in contention.

This ends a very good decade of baseball for the Tigers. In 2006, they made the playoffs for the first time since 1987. Jim Leyland took a team that hadn’t had a winning season since 1993 to the World Series that year, where they would fall to the St. Louis Cardinals in five games. Since then they’ve had seven seasons of .500 or better, as well as four straight playoff trips from 2011-2014 and two AL pennants. Alas, all of that looks like it is coming to an end. 

This team always seemed to play its best when it’s backs were up against the wall. After sputtering into the postseason in 2006 after a dominant start, few thought they could compete with the New York Yankees and Oakland A’s in the postseason. But they beat the Yankees 3-1 and swept the A’s. In 2012, they won the AL Central but were just 88-74. Still, they defeated the A’s in the first round and then swept the Yankees to get back to the World Series. But alas, they were stopped again, being swept by the San Francisco Giants, who won their second World Series title in three years. 

Their best team in this writers opinion was 2011, when they fell to the Texas Rangers in the ALCS in six games. That team was 95-67, like the 2006 team, but the 2011 team simply had more talent. Verlander had one of the most dominant seasons in recent memory, winning the AL Cy Young and MVP (first pitcher to do that since 1992 when Dennis Eckersley did it for the A’s) with a 24-5 record, 2.40 ERA and 251 innings pitched. Cabrera hit .344 with 30 homers while Victor Martinez hit .330 and had 103 RBIs, just two fewer than Cabrera. Jhonny Peralta also hit 21 homers, second on the team. In addition to Verlander’s amazing season, Jose Valverde looked like he finally had given them the closer they had been looking for with 49 saves. But the dominance of those two was not enough to compensate for the youth of starters Scherzer, Doug Fister and Rick Porcello as well as journeyman Brad Penny. Against the Rangers the Tigers came close, losing twice in extra innings and a 3-2 game after Verlander had given it all he had in Game 1. Honestly, that team had a real good chane to win the World Series that year had they been given the chance. But bad luck and just running into teams that were incredibly hot at the time just prevented this team from going to the top at any point over the last decade. Like the Atlanta Hawks of the 1980’s or the Buffalo Bills of the early 1990’s, they had the talent to win it all but things just didn’t go their way.

Leyland deserves a lot of credit for bringing baseball back to the spotlight in Detroit, but he nor Brad Ausmus was able lead the Tigers back to the top.

The Tigers seem to be starting the dreadful process of rebuilding as they traded ace left-hander David Price, outfielder Yoenis Cespedes and reliever Joakim Soria at the trade deadline. Don't be surprised if players like J.D. Martinez and Ian Kinsler are shopped in the offseason as Detroit starts closing the book on a successful era of Tigers baseball.