As Bonds Fades, Pujols Steps Up for Baseball
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Monday night, in the first inning of a game against the Pittsburgh Pirates, St. Louis’s Albert Pujols hit a tworun home run, which ended up being all the Cardinals needed for the win. The shot, his ninth of the year, was his fourth home run in as many at-bats, tying a major league record. After the game, his batting line stood at .364 BA/.508 OBA/1.023 SLG.
Is Pujols getting better?
Everyone knows the numbers he’s put up. The only players whose statistics through the of age 25 compare to his are Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, and Ted Williams – the very best hitters of all time. Pujols has a reasonable shot at retiring with the all-time records for home runs, runs, and RBI, especially given his freakish consistency.In every year of his career,which spans five full seasons,he’s had between 590 and 592 at-bats and between 117 and 130 RBI. He’s hit between .329 and .331 in three of those seasons, and his career mark is .333. He’s gone through an entire series without a hit exactly twice.
What’s scarier than all this is that Pujols appears to have no weaknesses of any sort. He’s a Gold Glove-caliber first baseman and has the speed and baserunning skills to steal 20 bags a year. He has the most perfect right-handed swing I’ve ever seen, handling literally any pitch in any location. Relative to the game as it’s played in his time, he strikes out as infrequently as DiMaggio, who routinely struck out less than 30 times a year. He brings it in the playoffs; his career line in 137 postseason at-bats is .336/.428/.620, as against .332/.416/.621 in the regular season. He hits the best pitchers in the league – .341 against Roy Oswalt, .388 against Ben Sheets, .348 against Mark Prior.He plays hurt – he won an MVP award playing through plantar fascistis last year, and finished second in the voting in 2003 despite playing with an arm so badly injured he wasn’t allowed to throw the ball.On top of all this, he’s acknowledged to be the leader of his team and a leader in his community. He builds orphanages.
Pujols is absolutely unique. Other great players are great because they’re surpassingly fine at one or several aspects of the game – Pujols is the best, or nearly the best, at every single one. He’s the best fastball hitter and the best curveball hitter, has the quietest and shortest stroke you’ll ever see, is a percentage base stealer on par with Derek Jeter and Carlos Beltran.
Pujols is the one hitter you’d want up against Mariano Rivera in the bottom of the ninth in Game 7 of the World Series, 951 1646 1082 1657and his work ethic is so legendary he’d probably be able to hang around in the majors as a Luis Sojo-type 25th man/semi-coach even if he couldn’t hit any better than Sojo.Every tangible and intangible indicator there is suggests he’ll get every bit out of his talent as long as he’s in the majors, and at 26 – five years younger than Alex Rodriguez! – he’s just coming into his physical prime. I can’t imagine any particular reason he wouldn’t be improving.
One of the small mercies of Barry Bonds’s continued slow implosion is that Pujols can now be acknowledged, without apology and without qualification, as the very best player in baseball. That’s important. So much of the ugliness that now surrounds Bonds is the result of his unambiguous status as the face of the game over the last few years. Baseball has tried,and not in a very subtle fashion, to push Jeter, Pujols, and David Ortiz on the wider world as the representatives of the game, but the casually interested public has instead, understandably enough,seen the guy with the big head and the bad manners who’s on SportsCenter every night being touted as better than Babe Ruth as embodying the game.
That can change now. If he’s not the best, Bonds is just a carnival sideshow. The attention he (or any player) gets is in direct proportion to his importance on the field, and the attention Bonds has been getting the last few years is inexorably going to swing over to Pujols, who’s uniquely equipped to bear that burden.In addition to everything else he has going for him, he plays in St. Louis, the very heart of the Midwest and, unlike Rodriguez, isn’t saddled with a $252 million contract that makes his athletic exploits secondary to his status as a symbol of excess. He’s the object of none of the resentment toward the modern megalopolis or the obscenely wealthy ballplayer that so disfigures baseball’s relationship with society.
Whatever one’s feelings on Bonds, it’s an unambiguously good thing for baseball that he’s fading in prominence as his skills fade, and becoming more of a pop culture villain along the lines of Mike Tyson than a ballplayer. The question to me is whether the game’s puppet masters can ably put everything they have behind promoting Pujols in the role for which he’s so uniquely qualified: the embodiment of everything good about the game. That will do more than a dozen corrupt investigations into steroids to clear the reputation of a tainted game.
