There's always a temptation to guess what would have happened if some injury hadn't occurred, but those injuries are the reasons people have identified these aging curves. Guys get older, fatter, and their bodies get beat up. Howard's achilles was discrete and catastrophic, but it's in the same "shit happens" pile as Mattingly's back and Hrbek's... everything.

Howard's BBRef top ten features a bunch of guys with similar post-30 fades like Richie Sexson. The law of anti-climax says that Howard isn't done just like Ortiz wasn't done, though. It'd be kind of cool if there was a way to identify some kind of shift in peripherals for prediction of a brief comeback season. It's never been entirely clear to me whether the phrase Indian Summer was offensive or not, but ... one of those. I'm sure that even if it isn't then it's not really worth preserving, but we don't really have a good alternative. Whatever it is, apply it also to Carlos Delgado's 2008.

Wikipedia has a list of equivalent terms. Apparently a whole bunch of western european cultures use a fall saint's day and just name a summer after him or her. This was my favorite description though:

"In Hungary, it's "vénasszonyok nyara" (Old Ladies' Summer or Crone's Summer) because the many white spiders seen at this time of the year have been associated with the norns of Norse folklore or medieval witches."