In surprising move, Angels release legendary Pujols
This should be the first line of Albert Pujols’ future plaque at the Baseball Hall of Fame:
Only player in major league history with 3,000 hits, 600 home runs and multiple World Series championships.
There is more to say, much more. But the engraver could stop there and let the simplicity stay with each visitor. It is a truly astonishing distinction. Only one other 600-homer hitter, Babe Ruth, won a title more than once — and pitchers walked Ruth so often that they never let him get to 3,000 hits.
Pujols, who was designated for assignment by the Los Angeles Angels on Thursday, created similar fear in his prime. Only Barry Bonds has drawn more intentional walks than Pujols, who has 1,334 total walks and just 1,317 strikeouts. He came of age before the generation of hitters who accept whiffs as a trade-off for power.
“Ever since I was in high school, I always told myself that if you strike out, it’s almost like hurting your team twice, because if you can put the ball in play, you force the defense to try to make a play,” Pujols said one morning in 2017, by his locker at the Angels’ training complex in Tempe, Ariz.
“If they make an error with two outs, you kept the rally going,” he said. “But if you strike out, the inning is over. So if you put the ball in play, you always have a chance to get on base. It’s something, as a professional, I always look at and always think about: ‘OK, you need to put the ball in play.’”
Of the 12 hitters with the most homers in major league history, only the fifth-ranked Pujols and the top three — Bonds, Hank Aaron and Ruth — have more walks than strikeouts. Pujols, 41, has 667 career homers, and you have to wonder if he will hit any more. His last came off Jordan Lyles of the Texas Rangers on April 26.
That was the day Pujols and his wife, Deidre, visited former President George W. Bush and his wife, Laura. Bush showed Pujols the oil painting he had made of him for his book, “Out of Many, One: Portraits of America’s Immigrants.” Pujols immigrated to the United States in 1996, when he was 16.
“I felt an overwhelming sense of humility and appreciation,” Pujols tweeted after meeting Bush. “Only through God’s grace does a little boy from the Dominican Republic find himself being honored by the former leader of the free world.”
Bush knows firsthand the potential value of a late-career superstar. When Bush’s investment group bought the Texas Rangers in 1989, Nolan Ryan had just arrived for the final flourish of his Cooperstown career. Ryan, then 42, would throw nearly 1,000 dominant innings for the Rangers, reviving interest in the team and helping build momentum for a publicly funded ballpark. The inscription on his statue there reads: “When Nolan Ryan came here he was a superstar. When he left he was a legend.”
In a way, the opposite was true for Pujols and the Angels. His first 11 seasons, with the St. Louis Cardinals, were nothing short of legendary: Pujols earned three National League MVP Awards, won titles in 2006 and 2011 and hit .328 while averaging 40 homers and 121 RBIs per season. Yet the Angels era has diminished his historical greatness.
As a Cardinal, Pujols had an onbase plus slugging percentage of 1.037, trailing only Ruth, Ted Williams, Lou Gehrig, Bonds and Jimmie Foxx in major league history. Then came a free-agent offer he could not refuse: 10 years and $240 million from the Angels, plus a post-career personal services contract. And Pujols was never the same.
He ticked off milestones with the Angels — his 500th and 600th homers, his 3,000th career hit — and helped keep the franchise thriving even as the Los Angeles Dodgers ascended nearby. The Angels drew at least 3 million fans each season with Pujols before the pandemic, extending a streak that began in 2003.
The Angels were the reigning champions that year, when Arte Moreno bought the team from Disney. Had Moreno won his own World Series in the early years with Pujols, the inevitable decline would have been easier to accept. Instead — even with Mike Trout emerging as the game’s best player — the Angels reached the playoffs only once with Pujols, in 2014. In their nine other seasons with him they were 597-626.
Yet pinning it all on Pujols is foolish. He was reasonably productive in his first six seasons, making an All-Star team and averaging 28 homers and 98 RBIs per year. But the Angels never built a top-tier pitching staff, as prospects fizzled and veterans flopped. And as years went by, knee and foot trouble slowed Pujols significantly.
On that spring training morning in 2017, he explained how he fought against time.
“Sometimes when you go through injuries, like I have the last few years, it kind of brings doubt into your mind: ‘OK, how much longer do you want to go?’” Pujols said.
“But that passion is always going to be there. I’m going to keep it simple: You don’t retire, the game retires you. The game lets you know when it’s time for you to walk out, and that’s how I look at it. The day that I feel I can’t compete anymore — it doesn’t matter how much money I’ve got left on my contract, that’s not who I am — I think it’s time to walk out.”
He still doesn’t think it is time. At a virtual news conference in Anaheim on Thursday, club officials said they made the move because Jared Walsh had taken over at first base and Shohei Ohtani at designated hitter, leaving no place for Pujols. But another team may bite.
“Albert is not a bench player,” general manager Perry Minasian said, adding later: “He’s as motivated as he’s ever been. I think if there were at-bats for him to play here, it’d be different. Let me put it this way: If he does go somewhere else and pursue playing somewhere else, I would not bet against him.”
Pujols has hit five homers this season, but with a .198 average and .250 on-base percentage, he served no real purpose for the struggling Angels. Yet dumping him did not sit well with Hall of Famer Pedro Martinez, who tweeted to Pujols that he was “not surprised about the shameful way @Angels treated you and your legacy today.”