The Chris Moeller Archives

The Pujols statbook

Albert Pujols was awarded his third MVP trophy this afternoon, becoming only the 10th man in big league history to win as many in his career. The Cardinals firstbaseman will turn 30 in January. With this latest, he becomes the first unanimous MVP winner in either league since Barry Bonds in 2002, and joins Stan Musial as the only Cardinals player to win three times. Musial took the NL prize home in 1943, 1946, and 1948; Pujols now in 2005, 2008, and 2009.

The occasion provides an opportunity for us to study the future Hall-of-Famer at greater length-- in particular, his extraordinary stat-line over at that incomparable website-- baseball-reference.com.

As a kid, I loved to flip over my baseball cards and study the stats on the back. In those days, the Topps-brand cards would print a player's entire career numbers-- year by year-- on the opposite side of the color photo. Sometime around the mid-1980s, the card companies abandoned the practice in favor of a career line and typically just the most recent 3 or 4 individual seasons. In the early '80s, though, veteran guys like Pete Rose, Tom Seaver, Carl Yastremski, or Gaylord Perry would have the entire backs of their cards covered with numbers. Their 18 and 20 year careers left no room for "fun facts" or such trivia.

I digress. My point is that I've never seen anything to compare to Pujols' line after his first nine big league seasons. The closest comparison, I guess, would be a sunset over the Pacific Ocean. It's just so implausibly... linear. There have been no inconsistencies, no dud seasons of any kind, not even dud individual single-season statistics. There have been no injuries to force anything more than an isolated trip to the 15-day disabled list. There have been no half-seasons, even when he debuted. Of course, it doesn't hurt either that he's played every season with the same team.

He broke in with a full (161 game) rookie season at the beginning of a decade (2001) and at the beginning of one of his decades (the age of 21). He's always finished with 600+ plate appearances, 500-something at-bats, 30+ home runs, a .300-plus batting average, and he's the second player in history (behind only Al Simmons) to drive in 100+ runs in each of his first nine seasons. At various times, he's led the league in the individual categories of runs, hits, doubles, home runs, total bases, intentional walks, batting average, slugging percentage, on-base percentage, OPS (slugging plus on-base), even grounding into double plays. (You ground into a lot of twin killings when you hit that many line drives.)

We've got to scrape the bottom of the barrel if we're looking for imperfections. The biggest ones I can detect are his first year when he struck out more times than he walked (he hasn't done it since and the positive gap keeps widening) and the summer he failed to score 100 runs (he finished with 99 in '07).

Just as an exercise, let's evaluate Pujols at his worst. If we take his worst single-season number in each category, he still puts up these numbers--

BA: .314 ('02)
OBP: .394 ('02)
SLG: .561 ('02)
Runs: 99 ('07)
Hits: 177 ('06)
2B: 33 ('06)
3B: 0 ('08)
HR: 32 ('07)
RBI: 103 ('07)
BB: 69 ('01)
SO: 93 ('01)
TB: 321 ('07)

Miraculous.

In addition to all this, he has a Rookie of the Year award (although only one), a Gold Glove (he didn't win his second this year despite breaking baseball's single-season record for assists by a firstbaseman), and has five Silver Slugger awards-- at three different positions. He has never finished outside the NL top ten in the batting race, or in its MVP voting. In that MVP balloting, he has 3 second-place finishes to go along with his three trophies, and he only one time finished lower than 4th in the NL voting (9th in 2007).

He's a lifetime .322 hitter in the post-season, too, with 13 career post-season home runs (tops in baseball for the decade). That HR average figures out to better than 2-per-post-season appearance by his team during his career (6), and he won the MVP Award of the NL Championship Series in 2004. He got his most important baseball prize-- a World Series ring-- in 2006.

The numbers are easy to provide. The adjectives are hard.

posted by CM @ 5:36 PM