Raw.

A phase of your life comes to an easily defined and well-publicized end, and you’re around for the opportunity to move on, something not everyone is lucky enough to be.

A roomful of friends whose bond will last forever are there for you on that day, nearly five dozen of them, the type of friends with whom you’ve spent spend entire days for entire weeks for more months than not, for what’s been nearly half your your life.

You have your kids by your side, and millions of fans you’ve never met are there for you, too, in other rooms all over the country, at least, the same rooms where you’d made their lives better many days without thinking about that, taking their minds off their own stresses and giving them joy for a minute or more here and there, and they’re there sitting down to watch you talk about moving on, and everyone of them remembers you well at that moment, and the truth is for many of us that level of appreciation got turned up another couple notches on that day.

Nearly five dozen of those close friends, the friends who you call “family” without a hint of cliché or drippiness, are in the room, just for you.

The people you care the very most most about, the people you are blessed to care so much about in numbers that many would covet, are all there, in one room. And when you say your things, the way you want to say them, with everyone’s intense attention, and you drop the mic — literally, deliberately — you stand up to make the slow, 30-foot shuffle out of that room, and you get about four feet into those 30 before one teammate starts to clap, and then two more and a coach, and then the owner and the clubbies and everyone else, and you don’t look up but it clearly registers. For sure. It registers.

Applause. No hollers and no leaps or fist pumps. This isn’t a baseball moment. It’s basic, consummately quiet, ordinary yet extraordinary, unified applause. As a television audience in perhaps the millions experiences it with you, in real time.

Awesome, right?

Or was it awful?

In sports it’s pretty much never a sign of happy things when teammates and coaches and trainers and front office officials all stop down from their routines to file into a room open to the media and, by extension, the public, as you take center stage.

Those five dozen were locked in on you, that is, other than the fraction who were staring at their clubhouse shoes, unable to look up.

That was the scene on one side of the room. There was another just like it on the other side.

Mortality is a weird, sort of incomprehensible thing at any level. It’s a thing in professional sports — hell, in high school sports or college sports or weekend warrior sports — that, though inevitable, isn’t normal. It usually arrives not because of health but because of ability bumping up against its ceiling or because the reflexes and reactions and trigger aren’t so sharp any longer, even if life’s prime is still ahead.

But sometimes, it’s because of health.

In that room among those five dozen were Jeff Banister and Colby Lewis and Matt Bush and Doug Brocail and Tony Beasley, men who have faced their own challenges to stay in uniform, and more, and they have survived and thrived.

They watched (or at least heard) Prince Fielder tell them, and the world, his world, with his sons at his side and a devitalizing brace on his neck, that his doctors told him he can’t play baseball anymore.

Done playing baseball.

Before Prince entered that room, while other baseball players started filing in and taking seats while there were still empty ones, it was incredibly quiet. Solemn, reflective, quiet. Appropriate, but still jarring, shrill if quiet can be shrill.

The only noise, faint but certain, was the sound of someone’s tee work, the repetitive and sometimes tedious but sports-beautiful sound of bat on ball, reverberating even though muted by its distance down the hall. That sound, as we waited on Prince, made me sad. It’s never made me sad.

He walked in and (after touching Adrian Beltre’s head, with impunity) he sat, between his agent and his boys, and he cried. Man, he didn’t want to cry. He didn’t tell his teammates for a baseball eternity that he was hurting physically, and he didn’t want to show the world he was hurting in every possible way at that table in that room. But his tears betrayed him, and that’s OK. It was real.

The sniffles in the room, faint but certain, were his, but not only his. And not only his sons’.

He talked, as much as he felt he could, and in what was a relatively short amount of time, he said so much. Nothing about numbers and nothing about awards and nothing about legacy. No. Prince talked about his teammates. A lot. About what they mean to him, about how much he will miss being around them every day, competing with them. About them, more than about him.

If you don’t think chemistry and brotherhood play a role in success in sports, you can hang onto your opinion. I’ll stick with mine.

Later, Banister — whose voice carries as much command as anyone’s in the game, whose words always calibrate the room — with a noticeably shaken voice of his own that I’d heard only when he talked in camp about the battle Beas would be going through, talked about the human being Prince Fielder is. The leader. The teammate. The things that a second neck fusion doesn’t take away.

Even if the spinal issues that resulted in it and the May 2014 operation that preceded it took away the raw power that, despite his .410 slugging percentage in three seasons here, still resulted in a career-ending .506 slug. Few hitters consistently let it eat the way Brewer Prince Fielder and Tiger Prince Fielder did and, in flashes, Ranger Prince Fielder did.

Prince’s final game was 25 days ago. He grounded out to the second baseman (stationed in shallow right field), grounded out to second again, grounded out to first, and, in the final plate appearance of more than 7,000 (counting 185 in the playoffs) in his big league career, he put the ball on the ground on the right side again, reaching first on an E-3.

Four grounders, pull side. Too familiar of late, if completely foreign as far as the pre-surgery slugger with the pronounced uppercut that no hitting coach dared castrate was concerned.

Emily Jones commented, as the presser was underway, that the “raw emotion” Prince showed as he “announce[d] his retirement [was] beautiful and heart-breaking all at the same time,” and that’s exactly what it was.

It was a man conceding his mortality. Far too soon.

The man with 80-grade raw the minute the high school grad put on a pro uniform in Ogden, Utah, and who put it on display as regularly and prodigiously as anyone in the game for so many years, was putting a completely different brand of raw on display Wednesday.

You may have as difficult a time wrapping your head around this as I did, when I looked it up:

When Texas traded Ian Kinsler for Prince Fielder on November 20, 2013, a full 1,322 games into Fielder’s big league career — 1,361 if you count the post-season — and 1,066 games (or 1,100) into Kinsler’s time in the Major Leagues, Kinsler had spent 230 days on the disabled list.

Fielder had spent 230 fewer days than that on the DL.

Right: Zero.

That’s Michael Young territory.

In fact, as of the day Fielder arrived, he was baseball’s reigning iron man, having played all but one game in the preceding five seasons.

Since the trade, over two-and-a-half seasons:

158 days deactivated for Fielder. Zero for Kinsler.

Prince told everyone on Wednesday, forcing a smile, that this year had been “the most fun I’ve ever had and the best I ever felt mentally about baseball.”

But not physically, and when the man paid extremely well to hit baseballs thrown in his direction at 96 miles an hour with life had trouble last month walking a straight line for doctors because of his neck issues, and lacked strength in an arm because of his neck issues, and felt awesome mentally but broken physically because of his neck issues, he wasn’t going to let on to his teammates.

But his doctors let on to him: Playing ball was no longer something they could stand behind.

He’s 32 years old.

Names like Eddie Murray and Darryl Strawberry and Juan Gonzalez show up on age-similarity measures. They played until they were 35, 37, and 41.

A man with a uniquely and gorgeously violent swing can’t do it any longer. Mortality is reality for any athlete. It usually arrives before he’s ready for it. But this one came far too prematurely.

Prince concluded his remarks with this: “I’ve got some cheerleading to do. And hopefully we’ll win the World Series. And pop some champagne.”

Then he took a few questions, and with that he picked the mic up and dropped it, he stood and his boys Jadyn and Haven stood, and he walked first out of the room that he had walked last into.

And his teammates applauded.

It had to be one of the best things Prince Fielder has ever heard, and possibly the worst.

Richard W. Rodriguez/Fort Worth Star-Telegram