It's weird to think of any baseball player being your most feared athlete. For one, as the old adage goes "if you fail seven of ten times, you're in the hall of fame" - which fine is not fully true (a .300 OBP is garbage), but still Pujols failed more often than he succeeded, but holy hell if it seemed like he was going to get a hit every damn time. The way he held the bat, rising and lowering metronomically, ready to whip with such quick fury from such a powerful man. I could just visualize each time him hammering a ball into oblivion. And often he did. And one time he did to a level still mesmerizingly awesome 16 years later.
I've written about Pujols' home run in Game 5 of the 2005 NLCS off of Brad Lidge. It was a horrifying moment for me, a young 14 year old baseball fan too overly attached that the Astros. Doesn't matter that the Astros won the series - doing so the very next game shutting down the old Busch Stadium. Doesn't matter one bit. It still ranks as one of the worst losses in my life as a sports fan.
Pujols' home run is larger than me. It's amazing how well remembered that moment is in the history of the league. I would argue it is the most famous non-World Series home run by a team that would lose the series (so I'm not including Carlton Fisk's home run, or Jeter's "Mr. November" homer). His team again would lose the next game but that homer lives on, because it so encapsulated everything about how horribly great Pujols was at his peak.
I literally started counting the outs in the 7th inning in hopes that he wouldn't have to bat again. Starting the 9th, every Astros fan knew that if Pujols got to the plate, he was absolutely hitting a home run. It all seemed so inevitable. We knew it when the inning started, knew it more after Eckstein hit a seeing-eye single, or after Jim Edmonds walked. It was even inevitable after Brad Lidge made Pujols swing wildly on the first pitch. It was inevitable the whole time. Minute Maid Park was as loud as a ballpark has ever been right until that hanging slider, than fell instantly into a silence of a funeral. Pujols could do that, just rip your heart out by his brillaince.
His slow mediocre ten years in Anaheim is so incomprehensible to me, specifically because of how incomprehensibly good he was in St. Louis. Mike Trout is about to finish his 10th season. He entered this year with 74 WAR through 9 seasons (really 8.5 due to Covid, and missing a bunch of time and whatnot). That is truly all-time great stuff. He likely ends this season north of 80. He's on track to having one of the best careers ever. This is barely better than what Pujols did in his first ten years.
From 2001-2010, in his age 21-30 seasons, Pujols slashed .331/.426/.624, for an OPS+ of 174. He hit 408 HRs and drew 914 walks to 646 Ks. He also played great defense at 1st base. This all totaled to a WAR of 81.4. Again, this is not all that much worse than Mike Trout, his now teammate. Of course, he had his worst year of his career in 2011 (that still meant slashing .299/.366/.541) and it was a harbinger of what was to come in Anaheim. It's sad to me the LA fans, and honestly the baseball public never saw in the 2010s what we all saw nightly in the 2000s.
Albert Pujols even in that "down" 2011 season made one last incredible show, hitting three home runs in Game 4 of hte World Series, a tremendous series the Cardinals would win. It was his last send-off - in a way you could wish his career ends at that moment, standing alone as the best player of a generation, the best player of a decade, truly one of the best talents in MLB history.
I'll never forget Albert Pujols because he never stopped haunting me, in a truly lengendary way. The Cardinals Pujols was one of the great players ever, putting together one of the most dominant decades the sport has ever seen. He ruined so many nights for fans of NL Central teams, laid waste to pitcher after pitcher, hit home runs that still haven't landed. That's the Pujols I'll remember, the one that was a true titan of the sport.
