700
Albert Pujols transcends greatness
Late last night, in a stadium that helped him reclaim his baseball soul, Albert Pujols turned around a Phil Bickford slider and put it rows deep into the bleachers. This was not the first time this man had served violence on the old horsehide. It was, in fact, the 700th.
I have said, in many different venues, that I didn’t know how important 700 home runs really was. 697, passing Alex Rodriguez for the fourth-most ever hit, that was the important one. With Pujols adamant that he was not playing another season (I appreciate the fact that, as he said last night, he proclaimed this his last go-around precisely because he knew he’d get to this time of year and think maybe he should stay), he wasn’t going to get to Babe Ruth in third place. 700 was cool, but it didn’t move him up the ladder at all.
Now that he’s hit it, though, I think there is something a little more special to the total starting with a seven. It just hits different, as they say. It somehow takes Pujols from one of the greatest to ever play to a partially mythical figure, the sort of awe and reverence Ruth and Hank Aaron have held over the years. (Barry Bonds, well, not so much, but that’s a different situation.)
Seven hundred is a good place to poke around with different numbers. For instance, he’s hit 500 home runs against righties and 200 against lefties, a split you wouldn’t really imagine given how the last couple of years have gone for AP, what with him crushing lefties and all. He’s hit 62 against the Astros, benefiting from them being in the NL Central while he was a Cardinal and then moving to the AL West while he was an Angel.
The Cubs come in at 59 and they had a 10 year window where he didn’t face them. Which is probably yet another reason Albert’s legend grew—when you can crush those baby bears, you are going to earn a lot of goodwill from Cardinal Nation.
It doesn’t matter the outs of an inning—224 with none out, 239 with one, 237 with two. He’s hit 380 solo shots, which by themselves would rank him 73rd all time, right after Albert Belle and right before Orlando Cepeda and Tony Perez, both Hall of Famers. He’s broken a tie with a home run 211 times. He’s hit 84 homers when his team is up one, 84 homers when they are down one. He’s hit 89 homers on the first pitch, 177 on the second, and 45 when the at bat goes seven or more pitches. 504 homers—the same number Eddie Murray had in his entire career—have come from the third spot in the lineup. He only has four homers batting second—but two of them were #699 and #700.
You can sort through all sorts of numbers and stats about his home runs, slicing and dicing your way to interesting factoids. A pool of 700 data points will do that. (For instance, Pujols was at 270 homers when I started blogging.)
Everyone keeps pointing out some of his big milestone homers. You’ll see a lot about the first, the 100th, the 200th, etc.
I think about some of the ones that don’t have fancy numbers, though. Like #62 (which, okay, is a fancy home run number but not in this context). It was his third career grand slam, hit off of Shawn Estes in Busch Stadium II. I was there for that game, the first time I had seen Albert in person. I was in the upper deck with three friends, one that was a Mets fan. Estes walked Fernando Vina, walked Edgar Renteria, and walked Jim Edmonds. Pujols then crushed a 1-1 pitch to center, giving the Cards an early 4-0 lead.
Or #81. It was the only Cards/Cubs game I’ve ever attended. Mark Prior, back in his heyday, held the Cards scoreless until the eighth. With nobody one and one out, Pujols again launched a 1-1 pitch, this time down the line in left, to tie the game at one.
Or what about #139, #140, and #141, fueling St. Louis’s comeback from an early deficit in Wrigley Field in one of the wildest games you’ll ever see?
What’s also remarkable about these lists is what they don’t show. Pujols has home runs off of 455 different pitchers. Brad Lidge is on that list, but not for the home run you know. He’s on there for #329, when Lidge had moved on to Philadelphia. Lidge allowed a home run on a 1-0 pitch, but the Phillies had a four run lead and so this was not tormenting for Mr. Lidge’s psyche, unlike the last time.
It’s amazing that Pujols’s signature moment isn’t one that counts toward this 700 plateau. I’ve seen someone argue that postseason stats should count as part of a player’s total, which is pretty extreme and not something I’d argue for in the least, especially as the playoffs continue to expand like Dollar General in the south. If you did count those homers, though, Pujols would currently stand at 719. (It still wouldn’t matter, though—Ruth would be at 729, Aaron at 761, and Bonds at 771.)
I feel pretty confident Pujols has one or two homers left in him. I doubt he finishes at 700 even, which is a remarkable thing given that back in May I was wondering if we’d seen the last Pujols homer. The gap between 683 and 684 was a large one, after all, and there wasn’t anything that indicated the magic that was to come.
That’s the difference between great and legendary, though. We’ll tell the story of Albert Pujols—from fresh faced rookie (I remember the Fernando Tatis trade and thinking it created room for him down the road, not expecting “down the road” to be a couple of months) to MVP to exile to this remarkable, crazy coda to the career. Eighty years from now, they’ll talk about Pujols in ways that we talk about Ruth and Aaron—with bated breath and wonder.
And we got to see it on a daily basis.