Revisiting the Exile

For this story to end happily, Albert had to be an Angel

At the ceremony before the last home game at Busch, Adam Wainwright made the statement that, had #5 stayed home, “we’d have won two or three more championships in that time” or something to that effect. While it’s a great sentiment, so many other things would have been changed by Albert Pujols signing a 10 year, $240 million contract that it’s basically impossible to say if that’s true.

For instance, the Cardinals don’t get the extra picks to draft Michael Wacha and Stephen Piscotty, and it’s hard to imagine a 2013 World Series run without Wacha. There’s no signing of Carlos Beltran, who put up 6.2 bWAR in his two years in St. Louis while Pujols was posting a 6.4 bWAR over that time in Anaheim. There’s definitely no Paul Goldschmidt in St. Louis, because there would have been no place for him to play. You probably still get Nolan Arenado, because there would be room financially, but he’d have to take on more of the load.

Looking over the past, I think maybe 2015 would be the best chance at Pujols making an impact. That was his only All-Star season in Anaheim and the Cards were playing Mark Reynolds at first with his -0.4 bWAR. Perhaps they could have at least gotten past the Cubs that season, though anything else is, as we know, a crapshoot. Of course, 2015 for Albert was split 65/35 between first and DH (with a stray appearance over at third) and he wouldn’t have been able to do that in St. Louis, so there’s no guarantee that he’d have put up the same sort of line.

I didn’t really want to get too far into that sort of alternate history though. I wanted to talk about the fact that, as painful as it was at the time, Albert Pujols leaving and then coming back was likely the best possible outcome for his career and his reputation.

Let me be clear, I didn’t think that in December of 2011 when he agreed to the deal with the Angels. I’ve been blogging long enough that there’s a record of most everything and you can read what I wrote the day he signed over here (I’ve copied it via the Wayback Machine from a site that sadly no longer exists). It seemed like a terrible end to a legendary story. However, we didn’t know what the next few years had in store.

The argument against signing Pujols at the time was that he’d start to break down. That box started getting checked pretty quickly. After averaging 155 per year in St. Louis, he fell to 99 his second year in LA. He returned back to his averages the next few years but then went to 117 and 131 in 2018 and 2019 and played just 39 of the 60 games in the pandemic-shortened 2020 season.

This wasn’t all related to injuries, of course. The 99 games in 2013 was tied to his plantar fasciitis, which he had dealt with in St. Louis, but the other time lost was mixed between nagging injuries and the fact that he began to shift more and more to DH. Only two years (2013, when he was dealing with the foot injury) and 2016 (when he had offseason foot surgery before the season) did he ever spend the majority of the team at DH, but every year except the short stint with the Angels in 2021 before his release he was the DH in at least 22% of his games.

Enter Shohei Ohtani.

Obviously, with the talent that is Ohtani showing up in 2018, the DH opportunities got less. If Pujols couldn’t play at first he wasn’t going to get to play much. Without Ohtani, you wonder if he might not have had more season where his field play and his DH play were more evenly split.

Again, I digress.

Let’s say Albert signs that big deal with the Cardinals. With his foot issue in 2013, he’d have be out even more than he was with the Angels and he might not have played but 40-50 games. The foot surgery in 2016 would have either kept him out of the lineup significantly more or his numbers probably would have slid as he continued to play through pain.

Numbers that, as we know, were sliding anyway.

Pujols never had a season in Anaheim that was as good as a season in St. Louis. His highest batting average was .285 in 2012, his highest OPS .859 in the same year. What happens if Pujols stays in St. Louis and almost immediately starts a significant downhill slide?

For one, he doesn’t get anywhere close to 700 home runs, I don’t believe. For his career, he hit 120 homers as the designated hitter. Of course, a handful of those were this year but without the DH, you could make the case that not only does he not get to 700, he doesn’t even pass Willie Mays and finishing sixth all time instead of fourth in the home run race. Maybe even less, because he probably doesn’t make the effort to come back for 2022. It’s possible he’d have finished more like between seventh and ninth, jockeying with Ken Griffey Jr. (630), Jim Thome (612), and Sammy Sosa (609).

That’s even assuming he served out the full contract. He probably does—he was fairly miserable at the end in Anaheim but he would have played all of 2021 for them had they not let him go. With injuries piling up, his reputation taking some dings, and fewer milestones to push toward, he might have hung it up after 2020, say.

There’s the other part of this equation that we have to address as well and that’s the fan reaction. We’d like to say that we’d support Pujols through the bad times because he’s given us so many good times. That’s a flat out lie.

There were people that wanted to let him go in the first half of this season even with all the hoopla of him coming back. If he’d struggled through 2016-2018, making money that kept (or was used as a reason for) the club from improving, do you think people would have this fuzzy glow around them when AP came to bat? Matt Carpenter is another great example. A lifetime Cardinal who, granted, didn’t hit heights that Pujols did but had some remarkably great years, then scuffled his last two and people went after him on social media.

The exile was needed so the coming home would be wonderful.

It was basically perfect that Pujols spent all of his time out of the promised land in the desert of California. It was easy not to think about him when the Cardinals never played the Angels and they were rarely on TV. The fact that they were never that good either—famously only three postseason games during his time in Anaheim—allowed the passion and the anger around his departure to fade while also allowing him to pile up the numbers that he needed for baseball immortality. I think most of us would trade seeing #500 and #600 for the amazing run toward #700.

Even if things hadn’t turned out the way they had this year, even if we hadn’t seen a second half for the ages, the time apart allowed us as fans to really appreciate everything that he’d done. Knowing it was his last year, we could swallow whatever happened. To get what we got, to see the chase for #700, to see him pass Babe Ruth in the RBI list, to see him walk off the field with Yadier Molina and Adam Wainwright, were emotions and memories we wouldn’t have had without the separation.

While it’d have been great to see Albert set a lot more Cardinal records and to only wear one uniform like Yadi and Waino, I believe what we got was the best of all possible worlds. (Well, save the one where Pujols hit like 2001-2011 Pujols for another 10 years in St. Louis, but I’m pretty sure that one doesn’t exist.)

Absence makes the heart grow fonder. You don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone. Pujols brought us all the feels and a magical season. He just had to go on walkabout first.