The Pecan Park Eagle

Albert Pujols
Once Upon a Time
Baseball’s King of the Beasts

Worst kept secret in baseball.

If 38-year old Albert Pujols retires at the end of this season, look for him as a first ballot Hall of Fame inductee in the first year of his eligibility in 2024. By then, he will have strung together five seasons of inactivity and qualified himself for placement on the ballots of the certified baseball writers who get those honors of anointment.

3,000 Hit Club next.

If you care to browse the hitting leadership charts that Baseball America has so neatly arranged for us, you will find that Prince Albert is all over the place among the leadership figures in many categories, all time. In fact, Pujols is on the cusp of breaking into the 3,000 hit club during the Angels current series in Houston, in spite of going hitless in the 2-0 LA victory of Monday night. Sitting on 2,992 hits this morning, we Astros fans will simply have to hope he doesn’t catch fire in the remaining games.”Eight” is a doable number when the Pujols bat gets hot.

Doubles.

Albert’s pursuit of a room in the Top Ten Doubles house is fairly obvious as a doable, but quickly losable lease. He needs only 9 more two-base hits to replace the retired David Ortiz for the # 10 spot, but the still very active and spry Adrian Beltre is only three back of Pujols and capable of making his own run at the same spot this very year. Then it will (for a while) be up to which, if either, of these hitting giants retires after 2018.

Other Hitting Categories.

Click over to the Baseball Almanac Career Hitting Leaders chart yourselves and check out all the high placements in the Top 50 that Albert Pujols has achieved during his illustrious, if often heartbreaking career for us Astros fans:

http://www.baseball-almanac.com/hitting/hi2b1.shtml

The Ruthian Royalty.

The chart speaks for itself, but it lacks human wit. When I recited this list to good friend Sam Quintero by phone on his way home from last night’s first Angels game, I also noted what we all know — that Bonds, Rodriquez, and Sosa were also questionable for future inductions because of the steroids taint. “Oh well,” Sam observed, “at least, A Rod has Jennifer Lopez in his life.” — Sam did not say that A Rod had Jennifer Lopez “to fall back upon,” but he may as well have.

Have fun at tonight’s Houston debut of the “Japanese Babe Ruth” when he takes the mound against the Astros tonight at Minute Maid Park. Let’s hope that Orbit loads up his Babe Ruth persona with that stack of 50 hot dogs we see him ordering in the game time TV commercials before he takes the mound.

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Bill McCurdy

Principal Writer, Editor, Publisher

The Pecan Park Eagle

Tags: Albert Pujols' Career Crunching #s

This entry was posted on April 24, 2018 at 2:15 pm and is filed under Baseball. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.