The Chris Moeller Archives

Baseball as Greek tragedy

Tonight, most definitely sometime during the 9 o'clock hour (Central time), the (once-) Great Albert Pujols takes his first-ever professional at-bats against the St. Louis Cardinals in Anaheim, California. A year and a half after Arte Moreno, an otherwise inconsequential man, paid 254 million dollars to separate the extraordinary player from his team of destiny, Pujols' steep performance decline has evolved into probably the most absorbing narrative thread in North American baseball.

The mighty slugger is no longer healthy enough to play in the field, which puts a giant asterisk next to any offensive numbers he's able to add to his career total while lumbering through the American League. But for what it's worth anyway, his OPS during his 234 career games with an expansion Junior Circuit franchise currently calling itself the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim is .822. Compare that to his career Cardinals OPS-- over 11 seasons!-- of 1.037. Pujols' OPS to this point in the 2013 season (.755) would be sixth-best in the Cardinals' eight-man lineup.

The decline has come fast and it has come with fury. If it were a piano, it would be falling from a 10th floor window. And the aforementioned Moreno still has eight and a half seasons left of paying him, followed by a 10-year service contract for the man in the team's front office. "Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance" are no longer "the saddest of possible words" in the baseball lexicon. They are these: "Albert Pujols trades in Stan Musial's legacy for Juan Gonzalez's."

Cardinals' blogger Dan Moore put it most devastatingly this week, "The saddest facet of Albert Pujols' decline is that it's happening far away from anybody that cares about it."

posted by CM @ 7:18 PM