When will the Detroit Tigers contend again? Here's one possible timeline

Timelines. Tigers timelines.

People wonder when life at Comerica Park will resemble those days when Detroit’s baseball crowd reveled in Verlander and Scherzer and Ordonez and Pudge and Guillen, with a prime-time Cabrera anchoring the whole playoff-destined team.

The harsh news: It won’t happen for a while. The better news: It should be an entertaining era getting there, at least once 2020 arrives.

A candid estimate for the Tigers’ next playoff year would be 2024. That sounds like eternity, but in baseball’s world, it’s about the time required to rebuild with talent and with maturity once a team can begin to reconstruct, which in the Tigers’ unique case, really couldn’t begin until mid-season…