In analyzing Miguel Cabrera's enormous contract extension with the Detroit Tigers, I might as well just rerun my column on the Ryan Howard contract from April 2010: Teams just do not need to extend veteran players who are two years from free agency out into their late 30s (or beyond).

The Tigers might as well just light much of the $292 million they're giving to Cabrera on fire or invest it in downtown Detroit real estate.

Cabrera is one of the best hitters in the game but not the best player even in his own league, because being the best player involves more than just hitting -- defense matters, position matters, baserunning matters, and Miggy, although preternaturally gifted at hitting, isn't very good at those other things. He's been worth about seven WAR (wins above replacement) per season over the past few, and paying $30 million per year for that kind of production is probably reasonable, even if it implies that a free-agent version of Mike Trout would be worth the GDP of a small island nation.

Way too many years

The issues with the deal are the timing and the length. The timing makes no sense -- Cabrera had two seasons to go to free agency, and the Tigers could just as easily have taken care of this next winter, perhaps after making sure Miggy stays healthy through the whole season. The leverage wouldn't have shifted; Cabrera would have been a year closer to free agency but a year older and perhaps a year heavier, too. He might even have declined offensively in the interim, although I wouldn't have bet on it. They could have waited even into 2015.

Any number of variables could have changed in the meantime that allowed them to strike a better deal; it is inconceivable that Cabrera's price would have gone up in that same span of time.

As for the length, we just went through this with Albert Pujols, who signed a heavily backloaded 10-year deal with the Los Angeles Angels before 2012, only to enter his decline phase on the flight to Anaheim, Calif. His body has begun to break down, too, as we often see with bigger players in their 30s. Cabrera is now signed through an age-40 season that, as likely as not, won't happen.

History not on Miggy's side

Cabrera is peaking now, but hitters of his type -- bat-only corner guys -- no matter how good, decline into their 30s and do so, in general, more precipitously than more athletic or up-the-middle players. Many corner players who were nearly as productive in their 20s as Cabrera didn't even make it to age 40, guys such as Ron Santo, Vladimir Guerrero, Bobby Bonds, Buddy Bell and Dick Allen, none of whom played past age 37.

The history of players like Miggy in their 30s and early 40s isn't promising for Detroit. Only seven corner position players (first base, third base, left field, right field or designated hitter) have generated 40-plus WAR past age 30 since 1961. All but Roberto Clemente played at least through age 39. No pure first baseman has done it; Edgar Martinez, who played through age 41, is the only DH to do so. The top first basemen on the list were Willie Stargell at 36.2 and Rafael Palmeiro, whose career ended in disgrace after a positive test for performance-enhancing drugs, at 35.8.

None of the players on the list of 35-plus WAR has a listed weight higher than Chipper Jones' 210 pounds, although I think we can safely say Barry Bonds weighed north of that in his late 30s; Miggy is listed, somewhat conservatively, at 240. Jim Thome, listed at 250 pounds, had the highest WAR after age 30 of any player listed at 240 or above, with 32.9, followed by Frank Thomas at 23.3 and David Ortiz at 23.0.

Ortiz might be the best comparison for what the Tigers can reasonably hope to get from Cabrera. Papi has stayed healthy and productive into his late 30s, averaging 132 games and 4.1 WAR over the past seven seasons. He earned $28.5 million over the past two seasons and will make $31 million over the next two, or just a little more than what Miggy will make per season under the new deal. And the Boston Red Sox have kept his contracts limited in duration rather than committing to him a decade in advance -- with no evidence at all that this has cost them any kind of significant premium.

Cabrera most likely will be a $30 million-per-year player in 2014 and 2015, but the Tigers already had those years under control at salaries well below that mark. The problem is that, even with increasing revenues across MLB driving salaries up, he's unlikely to be a $30 million-per-year player in 2016 or 2017, and the odds of him being that in 2023 are infinitesimal.

He and Justin Verlander are set to make about $58 million combined in 2019, playing in a market that is shedding population. It's not any better a formula from a business perspective than it is from a baseball one.