MLB

Albert Pujols Is Having A Send-Off For The Ages

By Neil Paine

Aug. 23, 2022, at 6:00 AM

Perhaps a homecoming was all he needed.

“I think I’m here for a reason,” Albert Pujols had said back in March, upon rejoining the St. Louis Cardinals — the franchise he’d spent his first 11 seasons with — after a decade away. “They believe I can still play this game, and they believe I can help this organization win a championship.”

While the championship part is still anyone’s guess (the Cardinals have a 3 percent chance to win it all, according to the FiveThirtyEight forecast), Pujols was right about still being able to play. Yes, he is 42 now — almost twice as old as some of his teammates — and he declared before the season that 2022 would be his last. But Pujols is going out with nothing less than a performance for the ages.

There are the raw accomplishments Pujols has been tallying, such as passing Stan Musial for No. 2 on the all-time total bases list,¹ or his bid to become just the fourth member of the 700-home run club in baseball history — leapfrogging Álex Rodríguez in the process. (Through Sunday, Pujols needed five more homers to pass A-Rod and eight more to hit the 700 mark.) There are also the special moments Pujols has created this season, not least of which was a Cinderella run to the semifinal of July’s home run derby before narrowly losing to eventual winner (and fellow Dominican) Juan Soto.

But what’s most incredible about Pujols’s farewell season is just how Vintage Pujols it has been. No, his batting average (.273) isn’t what it used to be (.297 for his career). Remarkably, though, Pujols’s OPS+ this season (146) is slightly higher than his career number (144) — the mark of one of the greatest mixes of power and patience the game has ever seen. Among batters with at least 200 plate appearances in a season at age 40 or older, Pujols’s OPS+ this season ranks eighth; among 42-year-olds, it trails only Barry Bonds’s 2007 figure:

As far as career goodbyes go, Pujols is also going out in a style few players have ever managed to pull off. Ted Williams hit for a ridiculous 190 OPS+ at age 41 in 1960, which is the best mark ever by a qualified hitter in his final season.² (It also included a home run in Williams’s final at-bat, memorably chronicled by John Updike in the New Yorker: “Gods do not answer letters.”) In more recent memory, the gold standard for final campaigns was set by future Hall of Famer David Ortiz, who at age 40 in 2016 had an OPS+ of 164 and finished sixth in MVP voting. While Pujols hasn’t quite been as good as the Splendid Splinter or Big Papi were — he is a bit older, after all — his OPS+ currently ranks sixth-best among qualified hitters in their swan songs, as fitting a career finale as we could imagine for The Machine.

Finally, it has to be noted just how unlikely a Pujols renaissance seemed. Pujols’s performance after leaving St. Louis for the Los Angeles Angels in 2012 was mainly memorable for how underwhelming it was. In fact, Pujols would become the worst statistical player in all of MLB at one point. His OPS+ in the five years leading up to 2022 was a dismal 87, meaning he was 13 percent worse at the plate than an average hitter — an unthinkably bad run for a player who had been 77 percent better than average during his best five seasons, roughly a decade earlier. All of that makes Pujols’s resurgence this season just as unthinkable: Compared with the previous five seasons, his OPS+ is up a staggering 59 points in 2022.

That makes Pujols just one of 33 batters in history to ever improve by so much in a season, among players with at least 200 plate appearances that year and 2,000 in the previous five years. And his list of comparable seasons gets a lot shorter when we account for the fact that Pujols was: a) below-average in his previous five years (that leaves out guys like Bonds, who were already good and got way better), and b) quite old at the time of his turnaround. Before Pujols, only seven batters had improved on a subpar OPS+ by 50 or more points during their thirties, and none was nearly as old as Pujols is now:

It’s a list littered with one-year wonders, late bloomers and talented players with checkered backstories. But none sniffed the status of Pujols before his late-career slide. This was a bona fide, first-ballot Hall of Famer who fell on hard times over a period of multiple seasons, was cut by the Halos before his mega-contract ended, did little of note in a brief stint with the Dodgers in 2021 and was well on the wrong side of 40 at the time of his St. Louis homecoming. Aside from the situational ability to hit left-handed pitching, Pujols had shown zero signs that his final stint with the Cardinals would be anything but ceremonial.

And yet, here he is, performing far better than a mere figurehead, with a particularly scorching 1.428 OPS since the All-Star break. “The organization never closed the door on me, and I never closed the door, either,” Pujols said of the Cardinals during spring training. Maybe that mutually welcomed return was all he needed to rediscover the form that brought him so much success earlier in his long and storied career.

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