ST. LOUIS -- Perched on the bat running across the front of Albert Pujols' jersey, the pair of Cardinals has never looked brighter. It is time to celebrate baseball and birds in the heartland, and in Albert Pujols, the game's best player and ranking mayor of All-Starville, this proud baseball city can do both with gusto.
The local hero isn't simply a star, he's his own constellation. In the midst of a ninth consecutive great season to begin a surreal career, Pujols arrives at the All-Star break positioned for a serious run at becoming baseball's first Triple Crown winner since Carl Yastrzemski in 1967. He regularly is being mentioned in the same breath as Lou Gehrig as one of the two greatest first basemen in major league history.
He will catch President Barack Obama's ceremonial first pitch to kick off Tuesday night's 80th All-Star Game, a moment that is highly anticipated and expected to be quite emotional. Plans call for Pujols to be surrounded by living Cardinal Hall of Famers Stan Musial, Red Schoendienst, Bob Gibson, Lou Brock and Ozzie Smith.
"To degree of popularity, all of us had our time in the spotlight here in the city," Smith says. "Every generation that's come, you go back to the [Ducky] Medwicks and [Enos] Slaughters and Musials and Gibsons and the Brocks and the Smiths, and this generation is Albert.
"That's what's great about this city. Somehow, someway, from generation to generation, we can always find that one player that people can relate to and latch onto. And each year, you'd like to think that the quality of it gets better. I think that's what's happened through the years. The quality of it has gotten better and the degree of consistency has gotten better."
Pujols is 29 years old and a man at the top of his game. At the break, he leads the majors in homers (32) and RBI (87) and ranks fourth in the NL in batting average (.332) to Florida's Hanley Ramirez (.349). But for those 17 points of batting average, Pujols darned near became the first player to lead his league in the Triple Crown categories at the All-Star break since Hank Aaron in 1957.
He also leads the NL in runs (73), total bases (222), grand slams (four), walks (71), on-base percentage (.456), slugging percentage (.723) and extra-base hits (55).
His manager, Tony La Russa, has called Pujols the best player he's ever managed. One of his National League coaches Tuesday night, Joe Torre, on Monday called Pujols one of the best players he's ever seen.
And Torre, before managing the Yankees dynasty and four other clubs, sparkled as an All-Star player in a career that dates back to 1960. Among others, he was teammates with Aaron, Eddie Matthews, Rico Carty, Lou Brock, Curt Flood and Tim McCarver.
Sports Illustrated recently discussed how close he is to being the "perfect" ballplayer.
Pujols listens to all of this, and his reaction ranges somewhere between borderline amused and amazed. While this otherworldly player spends much of his time in a stratosphere beyond the other mere mortals playing this game, he insists some of the talk goes too far.
"I don't think I am the perfect ballplayer," he says. "If I'm perfect, then why are there things in my numbers I'd like to change? Strikeouts, errors ... the ball went through my legs [Sunday] in [Wrigley Field]. I don't think there is any such thing as a perfect player.
"Yeah, it's great, but you need to be humble. If you were perfect, then the game wouldn't be fun."
The Cardinals played a night game in Wrigley Field on Sunday and didn't return until around 2:30 a.m. Monday. When Pujols arrived at a late-morning news conference, he acknowledged feeling "a little stressed." He didn't get much sleep, and then to come into the city from his suburban home roughly 45 minutes from Busch Stadium and deal "with all this stuff", as he says. ...
Yet he handles the crush with grace, which is a far cry from the grump he often was earlier in his career. As Pujols has matured and as his game has sharpened, not only has he taken ownership of his team in the clubhouse, he's adroitly handled the responsibility that comes attached to his status as the club's franchise player.
He had one of his three children, 8-year-old Albert Jr., in tow with him Monday, and little "A.J.", as he's called, got quite an eyeful. Pujols said that when A.J. asked to accompany dad, he warned his son that it would be a "several hours" proposition. There was a media session for the NL All-Star team, followed by a news conference featuring Home Run Derby participants, followed by who-knows-how-many corporate types and starry-eyed fans reaching out for a piece of their hometown hero.
"He'd rather be out playing ball," Pujols said, and who could blame the kid?
Where does little A.J. play?
"First base, second base, everywhere," Pujols said, before adding with a grin: "I don't want him to pitch. I say no to that. I tell him it's better when you hit the ball out of the park."
Funny, because despite that throwaway line, Pujols insists he is not a home run hitter, but a hitter who hits home runs. He sets very few goals, but one of them each spring is to rack up 100 or more walks during the course of the upcoming season.
As Pujols asks, would you rather hit .300 or 30 home runs? Correct answer, according to Pujols: .300, because you're going to have many more chances to drive in runs. And plate discipline, in which a hitter maniacally hones in on pitches only in the strike zone, is the best way to do it.
Judiciously choosing which pitches to swing at makes him a better and more dangerous hitter, he feels, which makes his team a better team. The only problem with that philosophy is that you wonder if it will reach a point where he will receive so few good pitches to hit that it will neutralize him enough to slow the Cardinals.
"For the first eight years of his career, he's just been off the chain," Smith says. "It's been uncanny.
"A lot of times I ask myself why people even pitch to him. He just happens to be that great of a player. Very intimidating."
Opponents intentionally walked Pujols 32 times during the season's first half, three shy of breaking the team record of 34 he set last season.
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| Albert Pujols insists he's not a home run hitter, but a hitter who hits home runs. (AP) |
As for the rest, the astronomical numbers for which he's on pace, he won't bite. He's on pace for 58 home runs and to shatter his personal-best season high of 137 RBI set in 2006 when he helped the Cardinals to their most recent World Series championship. But as La Russa has said, he's unhappy if he goes 4 for 4 in a loss, but he's smiling if he goes 0 for 5 in a win.
"I think when you start thinking about big numbers it goes a little bit to your head and you start losing the focus of what you need to do in the game," Pujols says. "I'm taking an approach like it's my first year, 2001. Why change my program? It's worked for nine years, I don't change my routine at all."
Not that he needs to.
"He's got the hand-eye coordination of Ichiro," Dodgers All-Star second baseman Orlando Hudson marvels. "He's got the power of Mickey Mantle. When he hits a home run, he goes around the bases like Ken Griffey.
"The only thing he's missing is the speed of Jose Reyes or Carl Crawford."
Truth be told, that's why, stunningly, he fell to the 13th round before St. Louis grabbed him in the 1999 draft. Born in the Dominican Republic, Pujols' family emigrated to New York and, by the time he was 16, to Kansas City, Mo.
"He was a shortstop, and he didn't move well because he was chubby," one scout who saw him back then says, still shaking his head that 12 rounds passed before the game's greatest player was picked. "Our job is to figure out where guys can play, and we sure didn't do that very well with him."
Kansas City, Seattle, Pittsburgh and Tampa Bay were among the clubs that had contacted him around draft time. The Rays even worked him out.
"I remember they tried me everywhere, even at catcher," he says. "They said they were going to pick me in the first round. And they didn't."
A deeply religious man who frequently stops to give glory to God for his blessings and accomplishments, Pujols smiles while recounting those early days when he had no idea what the future held. Things have worked out OK, and he cannot imagine being in any place other than St. Louis.
And as first pitch of Tuesday's 80th All-Star Game draws near, the feeling is mutual. American League manager Joe Maddon says that he does not intend to walk Pujols in an All-Star Game, joking that if he did, "I might not get out of town alive." And three other NL first basemen -- Milwaukee's Prince Fielder, Philadelphia's Ryan Howard and San Diego's Adrian Gonzalez -- anticipate remaining stacked up on the runway like jet airliners in a storm on Tuesday night while Pujols gets most of the playing time in this St. Louis lovefest.
"I'm here to have fun," Fielder says. "This is Albert's town. If he plays the whole game, I'd have no problem with that."
The question is, as good as Pujols is at slowing down the game each night, will he be able to slow the blur that the All-Star Game has become -- news conferences, Home Run Derby, parties, the game -- enough to enjoy what he rightly calls a "reward" for an offseason's worth of work and an impressively productive first half?
"It's awesome," he says. "It's a moment as a player that you want to have. I look last year at Alex Rodriguez and Derek Jeter, and I look at past guys who had the All-Star Game in their city. It's amazing how the fans root for them.
"Obviously, that's not a problem for us because our fans every day are rooting for us. Cardinals fans are the best fans in baseball. To take the field [Tuesday] ... it's unbelievable. It will be a great experience."
Jeter, sitting in the same chair and at the same table Pujols had occupied an hour earlier, smiled, eyes twinkling.
"Last year was unbelievable, the way the fans treated not just me, but the Yankees in general," he said. "It was really something.
"But really, last year was more of a celebration of Yankee Stadium than anything. This year, I think, it seems like a celebration of Albert."
Says Smith: "In many ways, he's like Stan [Musial]. People ask Stan why he smiled every day. It's because you know you're going to get three hits that day."
One of the most popular players in the history of one of the most proud baseball cities in America, Smith talks about how fortunate St. Louis is to have had all-time icons such as Musial and Brock and Gibson playing in its midst. The torch is passed along, he says, and the newer models just keep getting better.
"You'd like to see it continue to get better, and he certainly has fulfilled that as far as stars in a city," Smith says. "He's all that, and more. And it's not just about the field, it's about the community as well. There's a lot to be said for his charitable work. He's part of the fabric of this community. And part of the fabric of the game."
Pujols? In the muggy clutch of the cheers, the game and catching Obama's first pitch, there is every chance that the player who has produced so many memories for others over these past 8½ years will have a couple of night's worth made for him.
As he says, "I think Wednesday, Thursday I'm going to look back and say, 'Wow! That was a great experience.'"
DILF 