PITTSBURGH — By next Sunday, if it hasn't already, the looming launch of the NFL season will have fully swallowed what remains of our baseball consciousness around here.
And this time, actually, it's a bit of a shame.
Next weekend's three-game series at PNC Park should not go unnoticed but almost certainly will, as will a season-ending visit from the same St. Louis Cardinals Oct. 3-5. They are the final two opportunities to see the great Albert Pujols, whose favorite slugging stage in the world outside Missouri has be the little ballpark on the North Shore.
In the final stages of an epic 22-year career, Pujols still commands attention as he climbs toward the blatant hagiology of the 700-home run plateau (he was still at 694 as of this deadline), no fewer than 32 of which left PNC Park with varying degrees of menace and majesty. At no other road venue has Pujols launched as many.
The most beautiful ballpark in America, as we've come to believe, is not terribly hospitable even to the greatest right-handed hitters, but Pirates pitching over the years has more than made up for it.
There's a certain historical justice, a perfect symmetry in the fact that Albert Pujols and PNC Park both arrived at Major League Baseball in the same moments, in the spring of 2001, when after a series of fairly intense meetings in Florida, the Cardinals finally decided to keep a 21-year-old Dominican they'd drafted less than two years earlier.
Veterans Bobby Bonilla and John Mabry were in the discussion for that final roster spot, but one pivotal argument had not yet been made.
"I went to spring training with the Cardinals; I had gone to work for them as a scout," said Jim Leyland, who was between managing gigs with the Rockies and the Tigers. "We were having our meetings, and the subject came up about whether Albert should make the team. There was a lot of, 'He's probably not ready yet, blah, blah, blah.' But one guy, Dave Duncan, the pitching coach, said, 'I'd take him.' The others said, well, why?'
"'If you've watched him,' Duncan said, 'this guy never swung at a bad pitch all spring.' They took him, and for the first 10 years he was probably the best player in the game."
This is how difficult baseball is. In April of that year, some of the game's best minds were not sure about a kid who, by October, would have 194 big league hits, 47 of them doubles, 37 of them homers. He'd drive in 130 runs and post an OPS of 1.013. He'd strike out only 93 times and would never strike out that many times again until 2017. In 2006, in leading the Cardinals to a World Series title against Leyland's Tigers, he hit 49 homers and struck out only 50 times. The guy leading the National League in homers right now, Philadelphia's Kyle Schwarber, has struck out 167 times with a month still to play.
"I just had the utmost respect for Albert," Leyland said. "Everybody would say when we played the Cardinals, well, you can't let Pujols beat you. But when he comes up with the bases loaded, what are you gonna do? And it wasn't just his hitting. He was a terrific baserunner, not fast, but a terrific baserunner. He was a terrific first baseman."
And then he disappeared.
To the Angels, for insane money. Clinically insane money. The Angels would end up paying almost 70% of the nearly $350 million Albert would make in his career, or as you've come to know $350 million, five-to-seven seasons of Pirates payroll. But for all that California gold, the Angels got little more than an average player (OPS .758) for 10 years, which is probably why we don't always think of Pujols in the way we should.
I mostly think of him this way: Players who accounted for 6,000 total bases: Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, Stan Musial, Albert Pujols.
"He's not as good as Hank," Reds slugger Joey Votto said in a recent interview with The Athletic. "Not as good as Aaron, but outside of Hank and Willie Mays, he's right there. Albert Pujols is in the first few right-handed hitters of all time."
It's no coincidence that it wasn't until Albert was safely out of their division and safely removed from the league itself that residents of PNC Park finally amounted to anything, in 2013, triggering a three-year string of postseason appearances that will likely never be duplicated.
Should you be hoping to see Albert in his final visits, the planning can be a little tricky. He generally appears as a DH against left-handed starters, and the Pirates haven't had one of those since Jose Quintana escaped near the trade deadline. He'd be an excellent pinch-hitting option against Manny Banuelos, but it's hard to predict when that might occur. Perhaps his lifetime .373 average in the ballpark and those 32 homers will tempt the Cardinals to start him, anyway.
Someone once extrapolated that if Albert played for the Pirates, he'd average 53 homers and 155 RBIs per season instead of his typical 37 and 116. You can't be sure, though. If he played for the Pirates, he wouldn't get to face Pirates pitching.
