Albert Pujols and the Crawl to 3,000 Hits
Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, and Alex Rodriguez: at some point soon, Albert Pujols will join this exclusive company, the list of players who have attained both the 3,000-hit and 600-home-run milestones. With a home run and a double off Dylan Bundy on Wednesday night, the 38-year-old slugger is at 2,998 hits after collecting just four in his previous seven games. His mid-April hot streak, such as it was, is a memory.
Baseball’s major milestones and records are supposed to be opportunities to celebrate careers, the totality of a player’s accomplishments, the road he took along the way, and the connection to history. But as they tip their caps, too often they remind us that the man we’re cheering is far from the player he once was. In Pujols’ case, the difference is particularly striking, as it’s almost impossible to fathom the gap between “the best player of this young millennium” and “the worst regular in the majors,” or how a single player might hold both titles at the same time. Any honest reckoning with his career, however, will take us to this uncomfortable place.
The Pujols who earned the first of those titles is the one we’ll be celebrating when hit number 3,000 drops. That guy — a powerful but bad-bodied 13th-round 1999 pick out of Maple Woods Community College who rocketed three levels in his lone minor league season and was in the majors by 2001 — is the stuff of legend. Pujols’ All-Star and unanimous NL Rookie of the Year-winning debut (.329/.403/.610, 37 HR, 130 RBI) began an amazing 11-year run during which he hit a combined .328/.420/.617 while averaging 40 homers, 121 RBIs and 7.4 WAR, made nine All-Star teams, won three MVP awards and a batting title, with 19 top-three slash-stat finishes. In 2006, -08 and, -09, he led the league in slugging percentage, wRC+,and WAR. His 81.4 WAR for that span was 27.1 more than the next-highest total, Bonds’ 54.3, and his 167 wRC+ trailed only Bonds’ 208, over more than double the plate appearances. On a rate-stat or prorated basis, Bonds did have more value during the period the two players overlapped, but beyond the video-game stats he put up from 2001 to -04, he didn’t have much value outside the batter’s box, producing just 7.1 WAR from 2005 to -07, his age-40 to -42 seasons.
Pujols’ remarkable consistency with the bat during that 11-year run was bolstered by defense that probably should have earned him more than the two Gold Gloves he won. His +61 UZR at first base from 2003 (when the metric was introduced) through 2011 was 36 runs better than the second-ranked first baseman, Todd Helton. And there’s the postseason. After helping the Cardinals to seven playoff berths, three pennants ,and two championships, he hit a combined .330/.439/.607 with 18 homers in 74 postseason games for St. Louis.
The champagne from the Cardinals’ 2011 championship had barely dried when the going-on-32-year-old Pujols signed a 10-year, $254-million deal with the Angels, the second largest in baseball history. In retrospect, the Cardinals dodged a bullet, for the Anaheim-based version of Pujols — who had set a career low with 4.0 WAR in his final year in St. Louis — has never approached the brilliance of what came before. After a more-solid-than-spectacular debut (.285/.343/.516, 30 HR, 133 wRC+, 3.3 WAR), it’s been downhill. Aside from a 40-homer 2015 (with just 1.6 WAR), he’s never matched any of those numbers in five full seasons, in part due to a long series of leg and foot injuries. After surgery to debride his right knee in October 2012, he missed over two months with plantar fasciitis in his left foot in 2013, managed just 0.5 WAR, and after rebounding to 2.7 WAR in 2014, his value declined in each subsequent season. In 2017, he hit just .241/.286/.386 for a 78 wRC+, career worsts across the board. His -1.9 WAR was the lowest mark among any position player and remains tied for the lowest in the majors by a batting title qualifier since 2010.
As an Angel, Pujols has hit .261/.317/.458 for a 111 wRC+ and a net of 6.8 WAR in six seasons and change, a performance dragged down by two signature flaws: a .255 BABIP and the erosion of his plate discipline. The former is the third-lowest mark in the majors among players with at least 2,000 PA, 56 points lower than during his Cardinals tenure. In the latter case, his out-of-zone swing rate has jumped from 21.2% in St. Louis to 33.4% in Anaheim, including a cringeworthy 42.2% this year. While he was said to have lost 13-15 pounds this past offseason in preparation for increased first-base duty, he’s hitting .248/.266/.446, having raised his wRC+ 12 points (from 80 to 92) with his big night. Basically, he’s been almost as bad as he was last year.
If Pujols were to walk away today instead of playing out the final three-plus seasons of his contract, his legacy would be secure. Via my JAWS system, he ranks second among first basemen, trailing only Lou Gehrig, whom he won’t catch. Via Baseball-Reference’s version, Gehrig had 112.4 career WAR and 67.7 for his seven-year peak en route to a JAWS of 90.1. Pujols has 99.5 career WAR, and 61.7 for his peak, for a JAWS of 80.6. He’s 2.8 points ahead of third-place Jimmie Foxx, which means it would take another -5.6 WAR (since JAWS is the average of career and peak totals) to slip into a tie. That can’t happen, can it? That mess aside, Pujols’ only contemporaries with higher JAWS are Alex Rodriguez (117.8/64.3/91.0 in a big league career that began in 1994) and Bonds (162.8/72.7/117.8 in a career that began in 1986). And unlike those two players, whose connections to performance-enhancing drugs have placed significant roadblocks to entry to the Hall of Fame, Pujols has no such baggage.
That’s the good news, and if you simply want to enjoy the moment and celebrate Pujols’ milestone when it arrives, you’re excused from reading further. You have until the end of this paragraph to make up your mind.
Still here? The bad news is that, while we’ve seen players limp to the finish line in attaining milestones, Pujols is arriving at 3,000 hits in worse shape than anyone who preceded him. Via FanGraphs WAR, he’s at risk of becoming the only one of the 3,000 hit club’s 32 players to finish below replacement level both in the season before he reached the milestone — normally, a signal to an aging veteran that it might be time to hang up the ol’ spikes — and the one in which he attained it. Here are Pujols and those 31, ranked by total WAR in those two seasons, in the second column from the right:
| Player | Reached 3,000 | WAR in 3,000 Season |
WAR in Previous |
Total | After |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hank Aaron | 1970 | 5.2 | 7.6 | 12.8 | 19.0 |
| Tris Speaker | 1925 | 6.4 | 4.4 | 10.8 | 8.7 |
| Roberto Clemente | 1972 | 4.0 | 6.5 | 10.5 | x |
| Stan Musial | 1958 | 4.0 | 6.1 | 10.1 | 9.6 |
| Ty Cobb | 1921 | 6.6 | 3.2 | 9.8 | 29.4 |
| Eddie Collins | 1925 | 4.7 | 4.9 | 9.6 | 6.1 |
| Adrian Beltre | 2017 | 3.1 | 5.6 | 8.7 | 0.5 |
| Willie Mays | 1970 | 4.8 | 2.9 | 7.7 | 8.1 |
| Pete Rose | 1978 | 3.5 | 3.6 | 7.1 | 4.6 |
| Honus Wagner | 1914 | 3.5 | 3.0 | 6.5 | 8.7 |
| Cap Anson* | 1894 | 2.9 | 2.2 | 5.1 | 4.1 |
| Carl Yastrzemski | 1979 | 2.2 | 2.4 | 4.6 | 3.3 |
| Nap Lajoie | 1914 | -0.2 | 4.7 | 4.5 | 0.7 |
| Derek Jeter | 2011 | 2.2 | 2.3 | 4.5 | 2.9 |
| Cal Ripken Jr. | 2000 | 1.3 | 2.9 | 4.2 | -0.5 |
| Dave Winfield | 1993 | 0.3 | 3.8 | 4.1 | -1.2 |
| Paul Molitor | 1996 | 2.5 | 1.0 | 3.5 | -0.1 |
| Alex Rodriguez | 2015 | 2.7 | 0.6 | 3.3 | -1.1 |
| Tony Gwynn | 1999 | 2.1 | 1.2 | 3.3 | 0.7 |
| Paul Waner | 1942 | 1.1 | 0.8 | 1.9 | 2.2 |
| Eddie Murray | 1995 | 2.6 | -0.7 | 1.9 | -1.2 |
| Robin Yount | 1992 | 0.9 | 0.6 | 1.5 | 1.7 |
| Al Kaline | 1974 | 0.8 | 0.6 | 1.4 | x |
| Rod Carew | 1985 | 0.1 | 1.0 | 1.1 | x |
| Wade Boggs | 1999 | -0.4 | 1.4 | 1.0 | x |
| Rickey Henderson | 2001 | 0.4 | 0.5 | 0.9 | 0.7 |
| George Brett | 1992 | 0.3 | 0.3 | 0.6 | -0.2 |
| Ichiro Suzuki | 2016 | 1.3 | -0.8 | 0.5 | -0.6 |
| Craig Biggio | 2007 | -0.8 | 0.9 | 0.1 | x |
| Rafael Palmeiro | 2005 | -0.2 | 0.2 | 0.0 | x |
| Lou Brock | 1979 | 0.8 | -1.8 | -1.0 | x |
| Albert Pujols | 2018 | -0.1 | -1.9 | -2.0 |
That’s not a pretty picture at all. While Pujols certainly has ample time this year to climb back above replacement level, he needs to reach 1.0 WAR by season’s end, something he hasn’t done since 2015, just to overtake Brock. Alternately, he could continue struggling and overtake Biggio for the lowest WAR of any player in the season in which he collected his 3,000th hit.
The column to the far right shows the total WAR of each player in the seasons after collecting the milestone. As you can see, seven of the above players, six of them among the lowest ranked, didn’t return for a follow-up. Five retired, while Palmeiro, who was suspended for failing a PED test just a couple weeks after reaching the milestone, was essentially chased away by an angry mob, and Clemente tragically died in a plane crash that winter while delivering aid to earthquake-stricken Nicaragua. Eleven others continued playing after 3,000 but delivered less than 1.0 WAR over the remainder of their careers, though both Beltre and Suzuki are still active; the former will likely play his way out of that group, but not the latter. Of the remaining players, some still had a good deal of value left, with Cobb and Aaron, the former all-time hits and home-run leaders, respectively, running away from the pack.
The accounting, alas, is likely to get worse for Pujols, who appears destined to remind us that Father Time remains undefeated. The slugger deserves all of the accolades he’ll receive upon reaching 3,000 hits, and all of the ones that will someday be cast in bronze on his Hall of Fame plaque. That said, his performance and his contract have set the Angels back in recent years, and given the way his play could threaten the team’s viability in a race for a postseason spot — something the Angels have attained just once since he arrived — I think that manager Mike Scioscia, general manager Billy Eppler, and owner Arte Moreno could be in for some difficult conversations in the coming months.
I’m not sure how to solve that problem, but Pujols and the Angels won’t be the last to face it. As a devotee of baseball history, I understand the importance of milestones, even when they’re counting things — hits, pitcher wins, even home runs — that we no longer value quite as highly as we once did, and even when they’re reached by players whose value within the frramework of our analytically minded age has been diminished as well. Given the choice between celebrating and sitting on our hands, it’s always better to go the former route (except in the press box, ahem), particularly when names like Aaron and Mays are attached, and hey, those guys got old, too. So, congratulations in advance to Pujols. Now please keep hitting.
Brooklyn-based Jay Jaffe is a senior writer for FanGraphs, the author of The Cooperstown Casebook (Thomas Dunne Books, 2017) and the creator of the JAWS (Jaffe WAR Score) metric for Hall of Fame analysis. He founded the Futility Infielder website (2001), was a columnist for Baseball Prospectus (2005-2012) and a contributing writer for Sports Illustrated (2012-2018). He has been a recurring guest on MLB Network and a member of the BBWAA since 2011, and a Hall of Fame voter since 2021. Follow him on BlueSky @jayjaffe.bsky.social.
Right now, Albert Pujols feels like an experiment in how badly a player can perform in the waning year of his career without adversely effecting the hall of fame credentials he amassed during his prime.
The decline years don’t really detract from the peak performance though. He’ll have both types of voters- the ones who value a peak period of true dominance and the ones who like stat accumulation.
Are there players who “played their way out of the HOF”? As in, had they retired earlier they would be in the HOF? I can’t think of any examples.
Some guys might have had to wait longer for the HOF due to their decline years. Don Sutton had to wait 5 years with his 324-256 record. Had he not played his final 2 seasons, he would have finished at 310-239. I think he would have gotten earlier. Same with Phil Niekro, who also waited 5 years. Had he finished 300-250, that looks better than 319-274. I think that both pitchers would say that those final to seasons were worth the longer wait for the HOF.
Maybe Jim Kaat? His final 5 seasons dropped him from 263-217 to 283-237, as well as raising his ERA. Maybe he would be out of the HOF regardless. He also picked up a WS ring with the 1982 Cardinals.
Perhaps Tim Raines would have made the HOF earlier if he didn’t have so many tail-end years as a limited role player.
Albert Pujols at his prime was one of the top players ever. Those other guys not really close at all….. Pujols by bWAR7 is the #14 position player ever. Absolutely no chance at all whatsoever that Pujols won’t be in Cooperstown 5 years after he retires.
Stever20: Yes, Pujols will be in the HOF 5 years after he retires. As will Ichiro Suzuki. But after 10 years of excellence (or at least getting shiny stats), Ichiro has turned in 8 years of slop. His career OPS+ is 107. His slop years were not enough to drag him out of Cooperstown, but I wonder if that might have been possible?
Those 845 hits that got him from 2244 to 3089 and the 126 steals that got him from 383 to 509 definitely mean more to his HOF chances than the drag on his average offensive numbers.
Jim Kaat probably was not making the HoF anyway but the last 8 seasons definitely did not help.
Career numbers 1959-1975:
235-187, ERA = 3.30, ERA+ = 113, SO = 2,151, bWAR = 46.1
Career numbers 1959-1983:
283-237, ERA = 3.45, ERA+ = 108, SO = 2,461, bWAR = 45.4
Kaat went just 48-50 in his final 8 seasons with an ERA of 4.08 (ERA+ = 91).
Yeah, but unless you’re ultra-dominant, and Kaat was not, you need to rack up some high totals to make the HOF. Had Kaat retired after 1975, he would have had a higher winning percentage and a lower ERA, but he without even getting to 250 wins, I think he would have no chance. Also, it would have looked weird had he retired after a pretty good 1975 season in his mid 30’s.
“Are there players who “played their way out of the HOF”? As in, had they retired earlier they would be in the HOF? I can’t think of any examples.”
Not exactly what you were going for, but Pete Rose. Lets say he retired [as a player] after the 1982 season. That was a down year after a dead cat bounce in 1981. He would have retired with 3869 hits, second all-time.
He almost certainly would have gone into the Hall of Fame in 1988 on the first ballot. Once he was in, would they have booted him from the Hall of Fame when the gambling scandal broke? Maybe, but there is no precedence for a player to be removed from the HoF, so at least some reasonable chance that he’s left in.
I’m wondering if Dale Murphy ‘played himself out of the Hall’ – if he retired after he was 32 because of “injury”, he would have been a seven-time all-star with 2 MVP awards, five gold gloves, and was a year removed from placing just outside the top 10 in MVP votes. At that point in his career, he had a 129+ OPS to go with 334 HRs.
After that, he played in five more seasons, with a .692 OPS (92 OPS+). The last two seasons he played in 44 games, posting .161 and .143 AVG’s.
Oh, maybe I could also mention Barry Bonds if he retired before the 2001 season…
Nah, had he retired after 1988 he would have had about 1700 hits. Nobody stays on the ballot with less than 2000 hits. Murphy was great in his prime, but he just couldn’t maintain it for long enough. I can’t think of a position player equivalent to Koufax off the top of my head, but Murphy isn’t it.
Andruw Jones
Jones should be in.
Curt Schilling probably played himself out of the HOF by playing video games.
I guess it’s kind of quibbling, but if you open up the search to non-qualified players, there are a few worse than Albert. Adam Dunn, -2.9 (!) WAR in 2011, Pedro Feliz -2.3 in 2010 and Felix Pie -2.3 in 2011.
Good catch regarding the qualifier
Based on the data we have it will seem that Felix Hernandez will put up -2.3 WAR in a coming season. Which, ironically might play him out of the hall of fame.
One of the stupidest contracts I’ve ever seen. The Angels deserve what they’re getting…
Good thing they can afford it. Imagine if the Marlins had ended up winning their bid for him and had to let Stanton go to Free Agency.
The stupidest part of the deal was how they massively backloaded the darn thing. Even with normal aging expectations and expected salary inflation, it’s never a good idea to pay $30M to a 41-year-old athlete!
The backloading was probably at the team’s behest. If you have to pay somebody money, it’s generally to your advantage to pay it in 10 years instead of today. (Inflation will mean the same money is worth less, plus you have the opportunity to use that money in the meantime.
Backloading is standard contract-building.
First of all, Arte Moreno has the financial means to pay for that. He has no qualms wit spending money. Even if he did, the usual hope is that the player might continue to play at a level that will allow them to unload the contract at a discounted rate before the wallet is affected too much. He didn’t, but if he had, they might have been able to move him to a rebuilding team by sending a prospect and eating a large amount.
Second, the AAV is lower than what he is going to start being paid which is all the tax threshold considers. Arte Moreno likes to avoid the tax threshold, but frequently runs above budget due to a desire to win.
Pujols’s approach at the plate is absolutely atrocious. Those horrendous BABIP #’s for many consecutive seasons represent a player who’s swinging at bad pitches just trying to put the ball in play like a Little Leaguer. It’s gotten even more extreme this season, and I suspect he’ll be DFA’d at the end of the year.
His contract has a 10-year “personal services” option after he retires. I think Pujols wants to hit the 2,000 RBI milestone. If he can do that this season, he might agree to retire and start the personal services option. (Or maybe re-negotiate the option to a higher salary in exchange for retiring).
I saw his 500th home run at Nationals Park. He was already not that great of a player, but it hadn’t been that long at the time. It felt like a completely positive moment, and it is easy to get excited about seeing something historic in person. I don’t know what seeing him hit 3,000 hits would feel like. I’m guessing it would be pretty easy to push aside his poor play of the past few years and recognize how amazing a player he was. Maybe I’m overly optimistic, but I just don’t care all that much about great players bad declines. I don’t care about Andruw Jones, one of my favorite all time players, sucking with the Dodgers and becoming a mediocre part timer with the Yankees. I just don’t.
I was lucky to see Thome hit his 600th in Detroit. That was such a cool moment. All the fans cheered him, Twins came out of the dugout, probably my favorite live moment of seeing sports.
I know this post is about Pujols but I was perusing the all-time hits leader list and noticed that if Beltre collects 137 hits (& his skills don’t seem off thus far so that’s more than doable) he would pass all of the following players on the career hits list:
Carew
Henderson
Biggio (already passed those 3)
Ichiro (assuming he outhits Ichiro this year which obviously seems very likely )
Winfield
ARod
Gwynn
Yount
Paul Waner
Brett
Ripken
That’s a pretty impressive group. To me, he has a legit shot at 3,500 hits which would put him #6 all-time (#5 if he can pass Tris Speaker’s 3,514). Passing Aaron’s 3,771 for 3rd place is probably a tall order and unlikely. I haven’t seen whether he’s declared his intent beyond this year but he’d have no problem getting a contract from somebody.
I hope Beltre sticks around for at least two more seasons after this one. He and Colon are the only active players left who played in the Majors in the 1990’s, and I’d hate to see there be nobody left to join the four decade club for the 90’s through 20’s. I believe the last few editions of this fraternity each contained multiple members (Griffey, Vizquel and Moyer, for example, for the 80’s – 10’s)
Re evilsquirrel13: I guess if you played for the M’s you have a good chance. (Griffey, Vizquel, Moyer and Beltre).
Selfishly – now the M’s need to have Jerry make a call to Texas for Bartolo. He even happens to be the soft-pitch type DiPoto covets.
If Colon is hesitant, he can tell em we have some tasty Grasshoppers.
Yep, just him and Colon with Beltran retiring. The “4-decade” club has always been one of my favorite trivia items and you are correct, the last decade that had less than 2 guys was 1970 (ie, the 40’s to the 70’s) when there was nobody (unless you count Minnie Minoso’s 1976 and 1980 publicity stunts)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Major_League_Baseball_players_who_played_in_four_decades
Publicity or not, Minoso DID play. You have to count it.
Looking ahead to 2030, I think we’ll get at least one. These guys are contenders:
Kershaw
Bumgarner
J. Upton
Andrus
Andrus I think is going to have a tough time once he can’t play SS any more. His bat isn’t good enough. Maybe Upton. Kershaw is already 30 so he’d have to pitch until he’s 42 which could be tough but always easier for a pitcher, especially a lefty. Bumgarner is a good call.
The issue with Beltre these days has been health. He sure seems like he could play for another few years after this one as a starting third baseman somewhere…but he’s on the DL now and had a shade under 400 PAs last year. He hasn’t been “injury-prone” in his career by any means, but he is 39 and this may be a new normal for him.
If I had to guess, I think he could grab another 137 hits but getting to 3500 would require getting about 140 hits per season for 3 seasons, or about 110 over 4. I just don’t know.
Well what can you expect from a player who is most likely actually on the other side of 40
Pujols definitely declined much worse in his early to mid 30s than the average aging curve.
First he lost all ability to walk. That is a contrast to guys like dunn or mauer who also declined mightily but kept their elite walk rates. He managed to keep his power on a decent level until last year (he actually out homered trout 71 to 70 in 16-17) but he had to totally sell out for it killing his babip on top of his walk rate.
And he also became the game’s slowest runner.
Is Pujols the game’s slowest runner? Possibly, but the last 3 years he is 7-0 in stolen base attempts, with zero attempts this year. Overall as an Angel he is 26-6. Pujols might be super slow, but his success in his meager attempts suggest he is really good at picking his spots.
Last year he was the slowest: https://baseballsavant.mlb.com/sprint_speed_leaderboard?year=2017&position=&team=&min=10
And the stolen bases are largely irrelevant, the metrics have shown he’s a terrible baserunner for years. Not because he’s dumb or makes bad choices, he’s just extremely slow and can’t take extra bases.
stolen bases are probably due to opposing batteries taking him absolutely not serious as a baserunning thread even if it means he gets like 2 free steals a year.
No one could be slower than Adrian Gonzalez.
Or Kendrys Morales
Ernie Lombardi
Actually according to top speed Brantley (who once stole 48 bases in the milb) is.
One little aside…
It’s entirely possible that the Angels have encouraged Pujols to become a free swinger. His entire job with the Angels is to hit the ball hard and drive in the 3 batters ahead of him. It may be a traditionalist mindset, but it’s to be expected because he can’t run.
You’re talking about the slowest player in baseball. His feet are completely ruined. Do you really want him running ahead of Ohtani, Simmons, and Cozart? Of course not.
If you ignore the OBP that is killing his value, his SLG is about where the Angels were hoping, his Hard% is the highest it’s been since 2010, his LD% is back to the level it was at in 2015 when he hit those 40+ homers.
That looks like a healthier Pujols who has altered his approach. His OBP is linked to a desire to get on base. Ask any Angels fan and I PROMISE they will tell you they don’t WANT him on base.
Angels fan… can confirm last sentence.
“But as they tip their caps, too often they remind us that the man we’re cheering is far from the player he once was.”
Not really. If you look at the 3000 hit chart in the article, the only guys who seemed to “crawl” to 3000 are Biggio and Pujols. You might want to include Ichiro, but he was decent in his 3000 hit season, and really bad in the two preceding seasons. I am kind of surprised how bad Kaline, Yount, Brett, and Henderson were in their 3000 seasons, and the season before. But that was before we understood WAR. I find it unlikely that in those years, people were saying, “These guys are toast and should retire rather than crawl to 3000 hits and hurt their teams.”
People might have thought that regarding Henderson in 2000, but he still got 36 steals, which probably made people think he still had something in the tank. He was only a below average hitter in 2001, his 3000 hit year, and added 25 steals and 81 walks.
For some of those guys, I bet there were many fans clamoring for them to not retire, especially Kaline and Brett. That was before we understood WAR. Brett had 19 homers in his final season, and Kaline was an All Star with an OPS+ of 107. Yeah, fans didn’t know about OPS+ in 1974. They both had paltry WAR, but I doubt people thought they were embarrassing themselves at all.
To be fair, it’s not a good idea to judge All-Star appearances in a player’s final season, as it’s become a stupid tradition to vote a future Hall of Famer into the All-Star Game if he’s already announced that he’s retiring at the end of the season.
True, and that is probably what happened in Kaline’s final season, a curtain call ASG for him. This makes sense as he was bad in the first half of 1974, and hit quite a bit better in the second half. Wikipedia says he announced his retirement in the final week of the season. If you check out his 1974 stats, I bet a lot of Tiger fans sincerely thought he could have continued playing.
People may not have fully understood just how done some of those guys were, but by traditional stats they don’t look too great either:
– Henderson hit about .230 over the two seasons in the table. Advanced stats probably actually help him over traditional Triple Crown stats because he still walked over 17% of the time and therefore put up OBP’s over .360 those seasons. Henderson was released by the Mets in May 2000 (and then signed with the Mariners in-season) and was paid only $300k for 2001 by the Padres (per Baseball Reference). Those are good signs that he wasn’t regarded as much of a player by that point of his career.
– People may not have understood how much value Brett lost by moving from 3B to DH and 1B at the end of his career, but he was a DH/1B with a mediocre batting average and without big power and RBI numbers (totals for two seasons, not just one: 26 HR’s and 136 RBI’s).
– Yount was an ~.260 hitter without much power (8-10 HR’s per year) over the two seasons in question. He may have gotten something of a pass because he was still playing CF, even though Total Zone says he was playing it at a well below average level.
“the only guys who seemed to “crawl” to 3000 are Biggio and Pujols. ”
OMG Wade Boggs
Good thing Pujols isn’t a horse. The way his knees and feet have been, they’d probably have shot him by now.
Just weighing.
He’s really been the glue holding he Angels to the ground. Hayyyyyy!
Just weighing?
Whinny gonna quit already
He’s been at it furlong time.
I can think of 87 million reasons why Albert Pujols won’t be retiring any time soon.
Greatest hitter I’ve ever seen outside of Bonds but the Angels would probably get more value if he didn’t play at all these last 3 years.
Actually there is a better hitter, on their team now.
Well, if the Angels are just waiting for him to get to 3000 hits and the Rays are selling at the trade deadline, the Rays have a pretty decent player who can play first that the Angels might be able to trade for. Would be a big upgrade for the Angels.
A Marte/Valbuena platoon could work. They are both average to better defensive 1Bs with credible bats!
Pujols will play til he feels he is done. He is on record as saying he doesn’t believe in the advanced stats and points to his RBI totals as proof he’s still helping his team win. So there’s that, I guess.
The real bad part for the Angels is that they still owe him about $90 million dollars to play for three more years, that will be ugly.
As an Angels fan I can’t say that I am totally surprised with where we are at today. I was certainly hoping for better than “the worst player in baseball”, but are we really shocked that he has been reduced to a league average bat who can’t run or field?
What pisses Angels fans off is that the FRONT end of the contract was supposed to be better. You live with the value deficit on the backend because you should reap tremendous value on the front end. That never happened. It was reasonable to expect a few years in the 5-6 fWAR range. Instead, it was 4 and then dramatically downhill from there.
I’m just hoping that Albert lives up to his comments made years ago …
“Former St. Louis Cardinals superstar Albert Pujols told the Los Angeles Times that he won’t play out 10-year contract if he can’t perform up to his standards.
“God has given me ability and talent,” Pujols told the LA Times. “But the day I feel like I can’t compete anymore on this level, I’m not going to embarrass myself. I’m going to walk off. Whether it’s next year or two years from now, only God knows.”
He went on to say that he would do so because he doesn’t want to be a financial drag on the Halos, who apparently have more cash these days than they know what to do with.”
http://www.bnd.com/sports/mlb/st-louis-cardinals/cheap-seats-blog/article17701079.html
Albert – hint – you are not living up to your standards. You are embarrassing yourself. You are hurting the team. We love you but you getting regular AB’s is not helping the organization or your legacy.
How many players have actually ever done this?
I can only think of one, Mark McGwire, who “unsigned” a contract and I think that was only like $10 million
Ryne Sandberg is the best example that I have.
When he retired in the middle of the 1994 season, he was still due just under $16 million guaranteed on his contract. That’s obviously not the sort of money that Pujols is still due on his contract, even after accounting for general consumer price inflation. Sandberg’s career earnings to that point were under $20 million (per Baseball Reference), however, so he walked away from a lot of money relative to his prior career earnings.
Pujols, by contrast, would be walking away from about $90 million but has already earned over $250 million over his baseball career.
I remember someone did this and had to look it up. Google pointed me to Gil Meche, who I now remember, but I think there may be others.
Gil Meche, though if I recall he was too injured to expect to play, and he didn’t feel good about taking David Glass’s money to rehab.
Personally, I’d have taken Glass’s money and sent it to GiveDirectly, but not knocking his choice.
The Angels gave a 10 year contract to a player coming off a career worst year who was over 30. As amazing as Pujols was, this, much like the Fielder contract that came after, looked like a disaster waiting to happen.
Let Albert get his 3,000 hits. Cut him immediately. If some other team wants to pick him off waivers, good for them.
If a “replacement player” means anything, then Pujols is the poster child. He’s being paid sunk cost, and the next guy up (presumed 0 WAR, $500K) is actually better value.
Other than sentiment, I don’t see the issue here.
(But man, is he the most obvious first ballot HoF candidate ever.)