By Tom
Something very real and intimate in me broke the day Albert Pujols signed with the Los Angeles Angels. This time of my life was marked by chaotic financial instability; I worked a minimum wage job at Old Navy that could only give me 15-20 hours a week, my FAFSA was reinstated after I fucked up so bad the previous year it was pulled, and I was going through indescribable mental warfare with myself. Waking up before my Historiography class to the news on ESPN felt like a malfunctioning gear struggling to turn, only to pop off in some cartoonish fashion.
Albert was one of the few constants I had in my youth. Two years before his debut, when he was turning unassisted triple plays at Maple Woods Community College, my parents had separated and begun the proceedings of what would be a messy divorce. We had been middle class and lived in a well-off conservative subdivision in Saint Peters, but shit happened. My mom was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and couldn’t work her job anymore, and my dad couldn’t stay out of jail to maintain his union dues as an iron-worker. They were violent and mean to each other, and when they broke it off I didn’t see the old man again for over two years.
We moved into my grandmother’s house, a two bedroom home in Wappapello where mom slept on the couch. I had some amenities that others in Wayne County didn’t have, but I also didn’t have a lot. Mom drew disability, grandma worked at the Amco–now a Rhodes 101–up the street. It’s sort of a small miracle that I did as well as I did in school and went to college, and one of the reasons I get so mad at people who speak out their ass about folks growing up with government assistance.
Despite that poverty, we had Fox Sports Midwest. I watched Albert and Jimmy and Rolen and Molina and Carpenter and so many others. Albert was consistent though. My first favorite player when I was a kid was Gary Gaetti, and when he left for Chicago two years later I clung to Mark McGwire, and when he was gone two years later it was Albert Pujols. I had Albert for 11 years, some of them good, some not so good. But he was there. Ain’t much you can ask out of a man than that.
Entering Labor Day he stood at 695 home runs, one behind A-Rod. Five more bombs and he becomes the 4th player ever to hit 700 in a career.
At the start of season it seemed highly unlikely. I spent plenty of time on the podcast talking about my hesitancy for signing Albert. He was at the end of his career and virtually only good for DH’ing and the occasional first base spell; not to mention it tied up a roster spot for someone else younger. But at the end of the day I said, “fuck it, why not?” and went with it. Baseball’s too rigid and focused on winning, have some fun every now and then. Bill Veeck would kill himself if she saw the game today.
Pujols had a horrible start to the season. My biggest fear was him being DFA’d or Cardinals fans turning on him. Not gonna lie he made a pretty good argument for that by himself. Going into July Albert was slashing .198/.294/.336, luckily the team was full of plenty of underachievers at that time.
Even more concerning his 4 home runs through 77 games put his pace well short of A-Rod and the 700 mark. The way his final season was going he would have a forgettable run, get some send-offs from some visiting teams, and end his final year in obscurity as he waited for his Hall of Fame call.
But something broke in him, maybe in some similar fashion to how something broke in me. He posted a .944 OPS in July and added 3 tanks to his season mark. He was saving a lost season, and by the end of the month he had a respectable season OPS of .724 and the Cards were 6 games over and 3 games back.
But Pujols made some kind of deal, it had to be with the Devil. The Cardinals always do this shit. Hell Pujols was at the epicenter when Devil Magic was born. It’s only right he’d conjure something vast and incredible in his final season.
Here’s the gist; the Cardinals won 22 games in August, they didn’t lose back-to-back games once. Albert Pujols was no longer the 42 year-old helpful veteran that everyone on the team loved, he was a menace. A destroyer. He was vintage.
Albert slashed .361/.420/.803 in August, he hit 8 home runs and drove in 17. There are so many highlights, but the best ones so far were his pinch-hit granny against Colorado, his two homer outburst against Milwaukee, or, my favorite, his game-winning solo shot against the Cubs on August 22nd, a game that ended 1-0. And that’s just August, the son of a bitch did it again to Chicago yesterday, coming in and hitting a game-winning pinch-hit 2-run homer against the Cubs one last time.
That part of me that broke in 2011 a long time ago, feels mended now. As if Albert’s one last hoorah has healed something deeply in me that I either I didn’t know, or didn’t want, to be healed. He’s 5 away and has 28 games to go. At this point it just feels like he’s destined to do it.
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