The Man and The Machine

by
July 15, 2009

Stan Musial’s legacy has come under discussion with the All-Star festivities taking place in St. Louis. Dave Brown at Yahoo! Sports asks why the guy isn’t more celebrated. Joe Posnanski is easily one of baseball’s most popular writers — widely read by fans of sabermetrics and superb writing alike — has repeatedly hammered Musial’s nail into our memory banks as one of the best ever to play. Still, the message seems to have either been ignored or largely forgotten until this week.

Present day fans of the Cardinals are spoiled much like fans of the Musial days. Sure, the Cardinals have some holes, and yeah, they’ve only won a single World Series with Pujols, but I’m guessing none of them would trade the experiences with Albert Pujols for another world title. Not because they don’t care about winning or anything silly like that, but because Pujols is as close to a deity as baseball has right now. He’s the type of player that, even if you can’t afford him in talent or dollars, teams should send their scouts to watch. To appreciate.

Few would argue Pujols’ placement amongst the all-time greats. He is only 29-years-old and it’s hard to see Pujols sliding off the mountain top anytime soon. He is beyond the point of being discussed as a potential legend, he is one. He’s a player we’ll tell our grandchildren about in the same tone – with the same exuberance and respect – as the older generations talk about Musial. That makes it only fitting that the two share more than a team in common:

1177_1009405_1b_aseason_blog_8_20090712

Pujols’ line acts like a shadow to that of Musial’s. Think about how many players outhit Pujols through age 29. Five? Maybe six? Hitting better than Pujols is the baseball equivalent of outmaneuvering Alexander the Great or outwitting Kurt Vonnegut. It happens, but not too often. Musial and Pujols have nearly identical wOBA, but Musial racked up 7,320 plate appearances after turning 30-years-old. Will Pujols? Can he hold the same level of performance if he does? Probably not, and that’s why we should think of Stan Musial in higher terms than we do.

You Aren't a FanGraphs Member
It looks like you aren't yet a FanGraphs Member (or aren't logged in). We aren't mad, just disappointed.
We get it. You want to read this article. But before we let you get back to it, we'd like to point out a few of the good reasons why you should become a Member.
1. Ad Free viewing! We won't bug you with this ad, or any other.
2. Unlimited articles! Non-Members only get to read 10 free articles a month. Members never get cut off.
3. Dark mode and Classic mode!
4. Custom player page dashboards! Choose the player cards you want, in the order you want them.
5. One-click data exports! Export our projections and leaderboards for your personal projects.
6. Remove the photos on the home page! (Honestly, this doesn't sound so great to us, but some people wanted it, and we like to give our Members what they want.)
7. Even more Steamer projections! We have handedness, percentile, and context neutral projections available for Members only.
8. Get FanGraphs Walk-Off, a customized year end review! Find out exactly how you used FanGraphs this year, and how that compares to other Members. Don't be a victim of FOMO.
9. A weekly mailbag column, exclusively for Members.
10. Help support FanGraphs and our entire staff! Our Members provide us with critical resources to improve the site and deliver new features!
We hope you'll consider a Membership today, for yourself or as a gift! And we realize this has been an awfully long sales pitch, so we've also removed all the other ads in this article. We didn't want to overdo it.




 

35 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Nathan
16 years ago

Very nice post about two excellent hitters and, by all accounts, class acts. It was mind-boggling to hear Pujols say that he wasn’t the best player in the game, even if it is just societally-necessitated humility.

0