In which your narrator comes to
terms with the Great Pujols, and
the Great Unspeakable.
Many people say they have been a fan of their favorite team since birth, but usually people become fans of their team over time. Their first game, their first playoff run, whatever it may be. I have been a Mets fan since birth. I mean it. When I was born in February of 1985, I was given to my dad to be held in his arms. He had just become a father for the first time and was overcome with emotion. He didn’t know what to say. What do you talk to a baby about? Spring Training had just begun for the 1985 baseball season, so he said the only thing that came to mind. He told me he was excited about Dwight Gooden. What else do you say to a baby?
— ZACH LINDER, Brooklyn, New York
ALBERT PUJOLS IS THE TYPE OF HITTER WHO, WHEN HE DOESN’T hit a line drive off or over something immobile, you’re actively surprised. The art of hitting a baseball has vexed great men for generations. Even the preternaturally skilled can be turned into the fool in their quest for even semi-consistent dominance. One of my favorite baseball quotes is from Mickey Mantle: “During my 18 years I came to bat almost 10,000 times. I struck out about 1,700 times and walked maybe 1,800 times. You figure a ballplayer will average about 500 at bats a season. That means I played seven years without ever hitting the ball.”
I’m not sure Mantle’s math is solid there, but his premise surely is: Baseball is hard. Even when you’re one of the lucky bastards who can do it—on a whim, out of nowhere, it can just go away. In Michael Lewis’s Moneyball, a fading David Justice comes back to the dugout after flying out to the warning track. Lewis describes Justice’s slow plight brilliantly: “ ‘That used to be out,’ [Justice said.] There was something morbid about it, like watching a death, play-by-play.” Even when it was easy for Justice, it was never easy.
Albert Pujols flies in the face of this more than any other baseball player I’ve ever seen. Watching him on a daily basis, like I pretty much have since he showed up in 2001, is like seeing Ted Williams in his prime, crossed with Tony Gwynn in his prime, crossed with Keith Hernandez in his prime, crossed with Mark McGwire in his prime. He is Voltron, a construction of the best sections of exemplary but still lesser beings. When Barry Bonds was launching homers during his grand later Giants seasons, he was a power machine: He either homered, walked, or struck out. There was something lumbering and awkward about him, an assembly line of moonshots that, if you adjusted the settings just one notch, would sputter and break down. There was no poetry to Bonds: Only Bonds could make the parabolic grandeur of a home run turn linear and flat.
Pujols is not like this. But Pujols is not pure and fluid like Ken Griffey Jr. either. Pujols has a strange air about him, like a low-level professor who’s voracious for knowledge and ends up trapped in the lab with some scary radiation: He’s a genius, serious Hulk. Pujols had to scrap his way to this point. Pujols was not always Albert Pujols. It’s what makes him great, and what makes him impossible not to watch.
Nobody remembers this now, but the only reason Pujols made the Cardinals Opening Day roster in 2001 was because Bobby Bonilla, the Proven Veteran that Tony La Russa had slotted to play third base, was injured. Pujols was not a can’t-miss prospect like Barry Bonds, or Alex Rodriguez, or even teammate Rick Ankiel. He was a pudgy junior college kid whose family had moved to Kansas City; married with kids; a secret baseball obsessive in a fat kid body. (If you have the opportunity, take a look at how tubby Pujols was when he was a teenager. There is hope for your batter-addled eight-year-old yet, parents!) He was a solid player for Maple Woods Community College, but not heavily scouted, and the teams that watched him play came away unimpressed. (The Devil Rays scout who passed on him later quit his job, quite reasonably.) There was still genius, though, if you could see past the fat to notice it: In Pujols’s first game, he pulled off an unassisted triple play and hit a grand slam. Something was there.
The Cardinals do not deserve as much credit for drafting Pujols as they love to take: After all, Pujols was picked in the thirteenth round—there were 401 men drafted before him—so they obviously weren’t too concerned about missing out. (They still almost did, lowballing him on a bonus before he called their bluff and they raised it.) As someone who has read every word written about the Cardinals for the last thirty years, let me tell you, Albert Pujols fell from the sky. No one had any idea he was coming. We couldn’t possibly have known. He was our special gift.
Pujols lost the weight, quickly, and started tearing apart minor-league pitching, first in Peoria, then Potomac, then in a brief stop in Memphis in 2000. He blasted his way to the Major League All-Star Game that rookie season in 2001, and boy howdy, were we ever off. The pleasure of watching Pujols was in watching him adjust. He was not Barry Bonds, a man told he was the next great American baseball superstar while he was still in the womb. That friend of yours who was fat in high school and then thinned down and was adored by every woman you knew in college? That guy learned the right moves by watching the skinny people, learning how they interacted when he wasn’t around, and then pouncing when the opportunity struck. Pujols played every game—still plays every game—as if he is that fat kid trying to make up for missed time. He plays like it could all go away tomorrow. He plays like he knows if he rests for just a second, someone thinner, someone for whom this was supposed to happen, could take it away.
You see, baseball requires great athletic gifts, but that’s a tiny, almost insignificant part of it. Pujols has worked his way into his physical strength, but the reason he is the player that he is is because he started with nothing and must keep ascending, a public school kid trying to outhustle the prep kids with the family accounts at the country club. There are hitters who are stronger than Pujols, with more powerful arms, with more natural speed. Albert Pujols was no one until very recently. He still plays, and improves, and studies, like he’s a nobody. It’s what makes him great. It’s what makes him special. And it’s what makes him better, every single year. Albert Pujols is a great American success story: Self-made, upwardly mobile, fiercely competitive. This is what we want our citizens to be. (If just to rub it in, Pujols became an American citizen in 2007 by notching a perfect score on his citizenship test. Show-off.) If he were a white guy playing in New York, he’d be considering a Senate run. His success is a real success. He makes us all want to be better. He shows it can be done.
I doubt Ted Lilly knows all this, though, and I doubt he cares: At six-foot-one, 190-pounds, he’s not exactly a hulking he-man himself—of course, compared to me, you, and the vast majority of humanity, he’s still huge—and thusly, he’s probably had to do his fair share of scrapping. Confidence and vigor aside, he looks far from enthused to be facing Pujols, even though he’s leading off, the bases are empty, and all told, if you have to pitch to Pujols at all, it’s best to do so with no one on and a three-run lead.
Pujols is eyeing him the way he eyes every pitcher, like the hurler is a burglar who has invaded his home and hasn’t yet noticed that Pujols is standing right behind him with something blunt, heavy, and murderous. Lilly is the type of pitcher, theoretically anyway, that Pujols struggles with: a left-handed soft-tosser, a deceptive changeup curveball artist with less heat than most but more heat than you think. Pujols’s lone flaw as a hitter is his impatience. Sure, he walks a lot—he is Albert Pujols, and when you are Albert Pujols, walks are inevitable—but there’s never any doubt that he’d rather not. When Pujols has no protection in the lineup behind him, which is often, because there is no real “protection” for Albert Pujols short a well-trained gorilla who can handle the curveball, he will strain to make something happen, swinging at pitches outside the strike zone and overextending himself in a way that, say, Barry Bonds would never do. (Bonds clearly didn’t give a shit: Walk me, fuck off, who cares, when do we eat?) When you’re constantly batting with no one on base, and you’re bored with walking, you start swinging at pitches you shouldn’t. Pujols did not create this Albert Pujols to trot leisurely to first base. He does not like it. And a smart pitcher like Ted Lilly knows he does not like it. The Cardinals are down three runs. If there were a way on earth for Albert Pujols to get those three runs back with one swing, he would do it. But even he can’t.
So Ted Lilly picks. He lofts a breaking ball here, he floats a changeup there, he butterflies annoying little whimpers over there, hoping Pujols will chase, will poke after one he shouldn’t. Unfortunately for Lilly in this at bat, he is locked in. Those pitches just off the corner of the plate, those “pitcher’s pitches”? Pujols leisurely flicks them into foul territory. Those pseudo-eephuses (eephi?) that tempt just north of the strike zone? Pujols takes them. He knows Lilly doesn’t want to walk him to lead off the inning with a three-run lead. He knows Lilly’s going to give him a pitch that’s hittable. Maybe not launchable. But hittable.
I’ve seen Pujols do this often. My favorite was a game against the Kansas City Royals, when he came up with the bases loaded. It was tied 4–4 in the fourth inning, with two outs, and Pujols had terrorized his hometown Royals all weekend, like he always does. (Do not snub Albert.) The Royals, quite sensibly, decided that they wanted to walk Pujols. They weren’t going to do it intentionally, because you can’t intentionally walk someone with the bases loaded without a court order. But they were walking him. You just knew it. It was worth one run to avoid this careening out of control. The count turned 3–0, and Pujols, almost out of boredom, started nicking pitches far out of the strike zone foul. Two feet outside? Dink foul. Almost in the dirt? Floop foul. This happened for about five pitches, and the Kauffman Stadium crowd began to sense something amazing happening. Pujols was waiting. He was willing to sit there and foul pitches off until poor Kyle Davies, journeyman, just wanting to get out of there alive, made a mistake. I got all day.
Davies, as was bound to happen, caught too much of the plate with a breaking ball, and Pujols’s eyes grew wide wide wide. Almost haphazardly, he smashed the ball over the left field fence for a grand slam, the result a foregone conclusion, an afterthought. Even Royals fans applauded him. He was an alien using superior technology to mock us feeble humans.
Pujols is locked in like that now. Lilly knows it. But he’s not going to just walk him, and he’s a far better pitcher than Kyle Davies. If Pujols is that locked in, Lilly’s going to make sure, no matter what happens, no matter how hard he hits it, that the ball isn’t going over the wall. At best, a dent in the brick and ivy. Keep the ball down.
On the seventh pitch, pitcher strategy and batter strategy converge. Lilly throws a low, slightly inside fastball that Pujols decides is to his liking—fastball, hittable, per Pujols’s plan—and he smashes it—on the ground, per Lilly’s plan—between short and third. Aramis Ramirez, who was a lot more useful for Cardinals fans when he was an underachieving Pirate as opposed to a Cub realizing his true place in the world, is honed in and dives to his left, snatching the ball with the most flimsy, fragile part of his glove. This part of his glove is enough. He falls flat on his face and then, with the precision of a military pushup, bounces right back up and flings the ball to Derrek Lee at first. But Ramirez, with all the diving and jumping and pushing and thrusting, is off balance and throws far short of Lee, who has to dive and leap himself, off the base, just to catch it. Then, as he’s falling over, he yanks his left arm in the air as Pujols passes by him, hoping to brush the great one, pure luck, stab-in-the-dark stuff. And he gets him. Pujols, despite controlling every aspect of every interaction, despite ending up with the exact result he was looking for—Ball! Hit! Hard!—is out, out just as much as you or I would be had we gone up there with a Styrofoam Nerf bat. All that trouble. All that focus. All that strength. All that work. And he’s out.
All it took was three professional baseball players performing at the peak of their abilities, showcasing athleticism they didn’t know they had, benefiting from the random physics of the gods. It took three men doing everything perfectly to get out Pujols. Barely.
You really are actively surprised he ever makes an out.
NOT EVERYONE is so self-made. Some need shortcuts. Which brings us to Troy Glaus.
This is a book about baseball, so I suppose there has to be a mention of performance-enhancing drugs. I don’t like it, you don’t like it, ain’t nobody like it, but there it is, regardless: I can’t ignore the pretend elephant in the pretend room. I trudge onward, battered, defeated, but hopeful that, someday, maybe my children, maybe my grandchildren, will be able to write books about baseball without having to mention steroids. We can only hope to leave the earth in better condition than we found it in.
About a year before this game, Glaus, a slugging third baseman who was a key part of the 2002 World Champion Anaheim Angels, was outed as a recipient of human growth hormone. In case you are one of the fortunate human beings who has been watching baseball games for the last decade on mute and then reading not a word about the game before or afterward—which is not the worst idea in the world—here is how HumanGrowthHormoneSales.com, a Web site that’s obviously impartial and lacks any sort of agenda, describes human growth hormone:
Injectable HGH human growth hormone, also called somatropin, is produced in the anterior of the pituitary gland inside the brain. It is one of the most abundant hormones secreted. It influences the growth of cells, bones, muscles and organs throughout the body. Clinical studies suggest that symptoms associated with aging may be due to the decline of growth hormone levels in our bodies. HGH is vital in helping prevent the aging process. Injectable HGH human growth hormone is one of many endocrine hormones, like estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, melatonin and DHEA, that all decline in production with age. While many of these hormones can be replaced to deter some of the effects of aging, human growth hormone reaches far beyond the scope of any of these hormones. Growth hormone not only prevents biological aging, it promotes weight loss, builds muscle mass, improves memory, significantly enhances sex drive, increases energy and many other symptoms associated with aging.
Well, jeez, that stuff sounds fantastic! When he received the shipments of HGH through “an allegedly illegal Internet distribution network,” Glaus was on the disabled list, dealing with shoulder injuries that had plagued him ever since the World Series. Because HGH was not banned by baseball—and because he hadn’t actually tested positive for it anyway; Sports Illustrated found receipts with Glaus’s name on them—Glaus received no punishment. As it was, his shame was overshadowed by a similar revelation concerning Cardinals pitcher-turned-outfielder Rick Ankiel, and all told, most people don’t even remember Glaus ever took HGH at all. (At least until I brought it up. Sorry.) After his injury rehab—the time he was taking the HGH—he signed a four-year, $45 million contract with the Arizona Diamondbacks and went back to doing what he did best: hitting home runs. He launched thirty-seven for Arizona, then thirty-eight the next season after being traded to the Toronto Blue Jays. (He made the all-star team that year too, and doubled and scored the winning run in the ninth inning.) More injuries came in 2007, and four months after the HGH allegations, the Jays traded him to the Cardinals for Scott Rolen. Glaus, to this day, has never commented on the HGH allegations, and, after being interviewed for the Mitchell Report, “the Commissioner’s Office announced that there was insufficient evidence of a violation of the joint program in effect at the time of the conduct in question to warrant discipline of Glaus.” And that was it, and that was that.
As he stands at the plate here with two outs in the fourth, he’s proving to be worth every penny the Cardinals are paying and definitely worth trading the injured and La Russa–phobic Rolen. He’s batting .266 with twenty-four home runs and ninety-four RBIs and has been splendid at third base. He also, more to the point, has remained healthy. I’ve watched about every Cardinals game this year, and I have not once—not once—heard a single fan even bring up Glaus’s supposed HGH use. Nobody cares as long as he hits.
Of course, Troy Glaus is not Albert Pujols. It doesn’t come easy to Pujols, but it really doesn’t come easy to Glaus, particularly overcoming injuries. Glaus was looking at free agency back in 2004 and needed to make sure he could convince potential suitors he was healthy enough to take a chance on. So he took a drug that wasn’t banned by baseball, a choice we only know about because of some enterprising Sports Illustrated reporters. Sure, most people don’t care. But the main reason most people don’t care if Troy Glaus takes performance-enhancing drugs is because most people don’t care about Troy Glaus. Barry Bonds was a different kettle of fish. Roger Clemens was a different kettle of fish. And Albert Pujols would definitely be a different kettle of fish.
ON A SEPTEMBER NIGHT in 1998, Mark McGwire hit his sixty-second home run of the season, breaking Roger Maris’s record in front of a frenzied crowd in St. Louis. The moment was perfect.
People forget now, but much of the joy of that night revolved around not McGwire, but Maris’s family. When Maris had broken Babe Ruth’s record in 1961, he had been showered with scorn and derision, and the media was so hard on him that his hair famously fell out. (You might have heard something about this from Billy Crystal.) Maris ultimately hightailed it out of New York and found solace in St. Louis, of all places, where he was embraced as a fellow crew-cutted, square-jawed Midwesterner. (If you can count Maris’s North Dakota as “Midwestern.”) Maris died in 1985, still bitter about his time in New York and the home run record he had grown to consider a curse.
The fanfare McGwire received thirty-seven years later was, indirectly, an affirmation of Maris: his children, who were in Busch Stadium that night, were able to finally receive the accolades that had been denied their father. When McGwire hugged his rival (and blasted Cub) Sammy Sosa and hoisted that tubby son to the heavens, it wasn’t just a celebration; it felt as if something had been healed, a mistake corrected.
In just a decade-plus, the night has turned from symbolizing everything that was right about sports into representing everything that is wrong. Now whenever the highlights of that night are shown, they’re usually accompanied by foreboding music and interspersed with the infamous images of McGwire and Sosa testifying before Congress about steroids. Bernie Miklasz, the fine St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist, published a book of his best columns, and prefaced the one about that night’s game—the column of his that has probably been read by more people than any other—with the notion that there was a temptation to “bury this event and pretend it didn’t happen.”
These days, McGwire finds himself about three hundred stubborn, scolding minds away from the Hall of Fame, and Sosa is probably even farther. If you were touched by that evening, you are now supposed to feel duped—that it was all a facade that has eroded away.
But it hasn’t. One name that hasn’t been mentioned much in the last few years is Tim Forneris. Remember him? He was the young groundskeeper who ended up with McGwire’s home run ball. Though collectors would have paid millions for the ball—McGwire’s seventieth ultimately went for more than $3 million—Forneris, caught up in the spirit of the moment, gave it back to McGwire, saying it belonged in the Hall of Fame.
Forneris’s decision was derided by the cynics, but most fans applauded him: The moment was too inspiring and uniting to be sullied by something as ugly as rampant consumerism and greed. It was sports in its purest form, a feel-good moment that was unscripted and unrehearsed. It was perfect. And now, if you believe the sports consensus, we’re supposed to be ashamed of that night, to see it as some dark blotch on the history of sport.
Whatever your thoughts on steroids and McGwire’s and Sosa’s murky history with them, that night really did happen, and all the optimism and warmth that came out of it was real. Tim Forneris really did give back that ball. McGwire really did embrace his son and provide a real-life Field of Dreams moment for fathers and sons everywhere. (Dad called me seconds after the homer, called McGwire “a class act,” and still has the game on videotape.) The Maris children really did cry and honor their tortured, maligned father. We were all touched by these moments, and why wouldn’t we be? They were real.
Sportswriters can cast their votes of “protest” all they want—and we can reserve our right to suspect they’re full of bunk. Mike Lupica of the Daily News has made a second career as a fierce voice against McGwire and Sosa and their “hypocrisy” . . . but his first career involved banking a tidy sum off Summer of ’98, his memoir about following that home run chase with his sons.
That night in 1998 isn’t going away and we shouldn’t pretend it didn’t happen. It did. And you know what? It was good. It was a great night.
THERE HAS NEVER BEEN any evidence that Albert Pujols has ever taken steroids. Pujols appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated before the 2009 season with the cover line: “Albert Pujols Has a Message: Don’t Be Afraid to Believe in Me.” He has established himself as the best player in baseball, but just as important, he is now the face of post-steroid baseball, the guy who will set the baseball record book straight, the guy who Did It The Right Way.
I’m not sure most fans see it this way, generally; fans are much better at making their peace with “cheating” baseball players than media folk are. Witness Glaus, or Ankiel, or Andy Pettitte, or Ryan Franklin: If we happen to like the player “caught” using performance enhancers, we tend to let it go in a way we never do with Bonds, Clemens, or Alex Rodriguez, polarizing figures in the first place. Our innocence was lost a long time ago, and unlike sportswriters from the time who let the steroid scandal pass gleefully under their noses, we’re not particularly angry about it. It’s sports. It’s baseball. It’s entertainment. It’s distraction. We’ll move on with our life, regardless. Sports isn’t a morality play for us: It’s a place to escape morality plays.
But Pujols . . . it feels like Pujols would be different. It feels like his brand of excellence—the up-from-bootstraps, hardworking, obsessive kind, the kind no one noticed until he grabbed a bat and whacked them in the face with it—is steeped more deeply in the real, in the work, in the This Could Be You. I think it would be difficult for people. I think that’s why Pujols is on the cover of SI, telling us it’s OK to come out and cheer without fear, telling us that it’s all good, nothing to fear here.
That’s the thing, though: We can’t trust anyone anymore. Why would we? Whether we believe steroids to be the secret, festering evil rotting the soul of our greatest game, or we believe it’s just the latest “impurity” that supposedly eats away at the game but in actuality couldn’t so much as make a scratch . . . it is naïve and silly to just acquit someone, across the board, when we know nothing about him and never could. Steroids were everywhere. They might still be. It is not a witch hunt, or hysterical, or even apathetic, to understand that.
To be 100 percent clear: I do not think Albert Pujols is using steroids. I’m just saying . . . what if it happens? What if it turns out that we can’t believe in him? Does that invalidate everything he’s done? The pure beauty of watching him bat? The fans like me who wear his jersey? (I have four.) Does it matter?
It doesn’t. Those times we watched Albert, or McGwire, or Bonds, or whoever, they were real. Those moments were ours. They belonged to us before they happened, during, and afterward. The only one who can ruin them is us. If Albert Pujols had secretly shot the pitch Brad Lidge threw him in the 2005 NLCS out of a cannon without anybody noticing, and we just found out about it now, it wouldn’t change that my father and I called each other to explode, together, fifteen hundred miles apart, rapturous, incredulous, fantabulous. That was our moment. Not Pujols’s. Not The Sacred Game Of Baseball’s.
Because it’s not just Albert. It’s all of us. It’s the game we love and worship at the altar of. It’s a game that can be destroyed by nothing. Our memories, our screams of joy, our shrieks of Bartman pain . . . they are ours. They belong to us. Nothing can change that. Nothing should.
GLAUS POPS UP to the shortstop, and the Cardinals go down in order. Six more batters until Pujols. Fifteen more outs to go.
KNOWLEDGE YOU NOW HAVE