It was June 2001, the first half of the first season of a career no one saw coming. Albert Pujols was back in Kansas City, Missouri, where two years earlier he had played for a community college that had never produced a major league player. Now, as a rookie for the St. Louis Cardinals, he kind of hit .350 with a lot of home runs. But how good was he really?
“The feeling that day was that there was a whole bunch of 10-year veterans coming your way — Mark McGwire, Jim Edmonds — so don’t let any of these guys beat you,” said Chad Durbin, who started that night for the Royals and remembered a scouting meeting with a trainer. “Jamie Quirk said to me, ‘I think your stuff will beat Pujols’ — and he didn’t even call him that, he mispronounced it. You just didn’t know much about him.”
The training was fast and convincing. Pujols played twice before penalizing a curveball for a homer in the ninth inning, ruining Durbin’s shot at his first full game of his career. It was the 20th career home run for Pujols in a journey that has spanned more than two decades.
“The house that ran from me is old enough to drink; he’s old enough to order a beer at the bar,” said Durbin, who is 44 and has been retired for nine years. “I did well at baseball and I was just trying to help the game. I have done my part.”
Pujols has said he will retire at the end of this season and on Friday he won his race towards the end. He hit 700 career home runs, twice homering against the Dodgers in Los Angeles, and joined the most exclusive home run district of them all. Before Pujols, only Babe Ruth (1934), Hank Aaron (1973), and Barry Bonds (2004) had reached 700.
“It’s pretty special,” said Pujols after the game. “If it really hits me, it’s when I’m done, at the end of the season when I retire, and probably a moment or two after that I can look at the numbers.”
Bonds finished his career with the most homers, 762, followed by Aaron with 755, and Ruth with 714. But Pujols, in this age of specialization and oversized bullpens, has hit more pitchers than any other homer: 455.
This sum is still growing. Both of Friday’s home runs were haunted by new casualties: His 434-foot shot to the left in the third inning came from Dodgers starter Andrew Heaney, and his 389-foot shot in the fourth inning was from reliever Phil Bickford. Neither had ever faced Pujols ahead of Friday night’s game.
“People ask me all the time, ‘Who’s the toughest hitter you’ve ever faced?'” said Glendon Rusch, 47, who hit three home runs to Pujols in his 40-year career. “And I always say Albert. Especially in its heyday, it could do the most damage in a variety of ways.”
Ruth spread his homers among 216 different pitchers and Aaron 310. Both sluggers retired well before interleague play was introduced in 1997, midway through Bonds’ career. Bonds tied 449 different pitchers, a mark Pujols reached on August 22 against the Chicago Cubs’ Drew Smyly.
“The way he’s playing right now, he’s definitely a different Albert Pujols than what I saw when he was with the Angels,” Smyly said. “I never got a chance to face him when he was with the Cardinals early in his career when he was just the most dominant player out there. But right now it feels like he’s that guy again.”
Pujols finishes with a swing almost as unlikely as his rise at the start. While he’s playing on a part-time basis in his retirement season, his .530 slugging percentage through Friday is the highest since 2011, the final year of his first stint at St. Louis.
Pujols averaged more than 40 home runs a year from 2001-11 with the Cardinals, for a .617 overall. He then left for a $240 million contract with the Angels and averaged just 23 home runs a year with a .448 slugging percentage over the 10-year deal. The Angels released him last May and he finished the 2021 season with the Dodgers.
But while Pujols batted just .256 with the Angels — compared to .328 before that — his presence always threatened opposing pitchers, especially with runners on base. Pujols, who ranks behind only Aaron and Ruth on the RBI career list at 2,208, had at least 93 runs in six of his first eight seasons with the Angels.
“Of course he didn’t average in the Anaheim days, but I think RBIs are a big deal and he had over 100 RBIs for a good stretch,” said Mets right-hander Taijuan Walker. “He was always productive. He did his job of herding guys in, and it could be with a sac fly or a double he pushed the other way. That made it difficult.”
Walker added his name to Pujol’s list in September 2016 with career home run #587. Walker, then with the Seattle Mariners, had previously held Pujols to a hit in 10 at-bats, but this wasn’t his day.
“I don’t even know if I got an out — home run, home run, home run, take a shower,” said Walker, who gave up three times in a row and only had two outs in the first inning. “Albert did it for me. I think it was a fastball, center left. It was pretty deep too. I remember they said he couldn’t get the fastball up, but he could get it down, so I tried to beat him up. And I think a lot of his home runs are over now.”
That was the field Smyly tried out in the seventh inning of a scoreless game at Wrigley Field last month: a 1-2 fastball at 93 mph, high over the outer half of the plate. Pujols hit it in the first row of left field stands for homer #693, the only run of the game. The pitch was 4.23 feet off the ground, according to Statcast, making it the second highest pitch hit for a homer this season.
“Early on in the game, however, I threw him a curveball under the zone — and he hit that off the wall, too,” Smyly said. “He’s just locked up.”
Pujols broke another goalless tie against the Cubs on September 4 at Busch Stadium in St. Louis, lifting Brandon Hughes’ fastball for a commanding drive over the left field bullpen in the eighth inning. Hughes, a freshman, insisted Pujol’s resume made no difference to him – “I don’t name a thug when I’m out there,” he said – but he clearly knew Pujol’s story.
“I’m from Detroit, so we lost to the Cardinals,” said Hughes, who was 10 when Pujols led St. Louis to the 2006 World Series title. “I say ‘we’ because I was a Tigers fan growing up.”
Pujols hit right field in front of Justin Verlander in Game 1 of this World Series, demonstrating a trait he is known for. Among the many pitchers he’s hit for homers are some of the best to ever take the mound.
“Jim Leyland mentioned this when I was with him in Detroit: ‘Albert Pujols and these guys, they pitched really well, really well,'” Durbin said, referring to the Tigers’ former manager. “That’s what I think about Albert: he hit good, quality pitches really hard – and then when you made mistakes, he punished them. And that’s the difference between the guys who have a career average of .280 with 350 homers, which is a hell of a career, and a guy like him.”
Ace pitchers from the last decade often confused Pujols; Corey Kluber and Chris Sale have held him together in 44 at-bats on three hits, with only one home run (2012 by left-handed Sale).
But consider this larger collection of retired celebrities, including a group with 23 Cy Young Awards: Roger Clemens, Tom Glavine, Randy Johnson, Clayton Kershaw, Greg Maddux and Johan Santana. Pujols smashed 10 of their home runs – including five from Johnson – while hitting a combined .367.
A .367 average is one point better than the highest career mark in Ty Cobb’s history. So while Pujols will always symbolize hitting, remember that power was only part of the package.
He was even better than Cobb against Clemens, Glavine, Johnson, Kershaw, Maddux and Santana.