Still, Cabrera is not just a pure hitter. He’s also a power hitter and one who happened to be playing during a “historic” era in which sluggers did things that had never been done before. Perhaps that’s why he seems to have received far less acclaim than, say, Sammy Sosa or Mark McGwire did during their flashbulb romps. His home-run total during his triple-crown-winning season would have placed him, for example, 29 behind Barry Bonds during his “record-breaking” 2001 season. In fact, Cabrera’s 44 homers would have ranked 10th in baseball that year, behind the folkloric Luis Gonzalez, Shawn Green and Richie Sexson.

Those numbers might raise immediate curiosity today, and Cabrera says baseball’s steroid problems are “in the past.” But of course the issue looms everywhere over the game. As I drove the 25 minutes from the airport to Comerica Park, the discussion on the local sports-radio station was dominated by what to do with Jhonny Peralta, the Tigers’ shortstop who was serving a 50-game suspension for violating the league’s drug program but was eligible to return for the playoffs. The season also included the 65-game suspension of Ryan Braun, a former M.V.P., and Alex Rodriguez’s 211-game ban (which he played through while on appeal).

Sluggers used to be the heroes. Now they and their statistics have become suspect. But while fans have been outraged over performance-enhancing drugs, they are also conditioned to expect their results. Cabrera, 30, has never been linked in any way to P.E.D.’s. (His beer-league physique is one obvious defense.) On the field, his only blemish is that he has put up remarkable numbers during an era in which so much seemed too good to be true, and regularly proved just that. In a sense, Cabrera is now positioned to redeem the modern slugger. The question is whether he can compete with the fantasy of players past.

Cabrera’s constitution is not his game’s only anachronism. Over the past decade or so, the stat geeks, data brains and Bill James basement set have tried to redefine the “value” of the modern baseball player, introducing measurements like W.A.R. (wins above replacement) and w.R.C.+ (an indirect attempt to determine the number of runs a player creates) and de-emphasizing traditional power metrics like batting average and R.B.I. Cabrera is perhaps the old school’s best defense against the new one. When I asked what he considered baseball’s most important offensive statistic, he quickly said R.B.I. and then became slightly defensive. “How do you score runs? You need someone to drive guys to home plate. Not a lot of guys can do that right now. You count, it’s not many.”

Cabrera’s big-kid reputation implies, in part, a breezy indifference to the way most modern hitters prepare: endless film-room study, advanced training regimens and so forth. But it belies his own unique obsessiveness as a hitter. Cabrera resists watching too much video of opposing pitchers because, he told me, he fears that the alternate perspectives of the pitchers’ previous approaches could throw him off in the real-time context of a game. Cabrera also hates pitching machines. “I can’t hit it,” he says. “Because you don’t have time. They throw the ball by you — woomph.” This is puzzling to me; pitching machines, after all, usually deliver the ball considerably slower and straighter than real Major League players. “But you don’t see arm action,” Cabrera insists. In fact, pitching machines cannot help him hone what may be his greatest advantage. In a live at-bat, he can do the bulk of his mental work before the ball leaves the pitcher’s hand, recognizing the pitcher’s grip, analyzing the arm angle and even picking up slight variances in his leg kick in the fractions of a second before a 90-something-mile-an-hour fastball whizzes past the plate. “Right up here,” Cabrera says, holding his hand over his head like a pitcher about to release. “If I don’t recognize the ball in hand, I’m in trouble.”