Albert Pujols is the best young hitter in baseball because he has great hands. Pujols constantly changes his stance, but he never messes with his hands, at least not since they came to dominate how he swings the bat in the last three years.
“It doesn’t matter how weird of a stance I have, my hands are always in great position to throw it out to the ball,” he says.
As he takes a short stride, his hands drop down and snap the bat through the strike zone. The bat head usually stays higher than his hands. The bat whips so hard it looks like a hose.
“I want to try to catch the ball in front with my top hand,” Pujols says. “If you have great hands, you don’t have to worry about your lower body. You just want to relax and just react.”
Cardinals hitting coach Mitchell Page says Pujols has the fastest hands in the game and uses them to hit the ball to all fields.
“I think that’s an adjustment he has made,” says Dave Karaff, the Cardinals scout who signed Pujols out of a Kansas City community college four years ago. “He was pretty much a pull hitter when he was in high school and junior college.”
Pujols, 23, does not have a classic home run swing. His home runs often are line drives that scream over the wall.
“He’s not trying to hit home runs, trust me on that one,” Page says. “He’s trying to hit the ball hard.”
Pujols says there are times when even he is surprised by how good his hands are. On May 18 against the Cubs, Mark Prior busted a pitch in on Pujols, who hit a tracer over the left-field fence.
“I wasn’t even looking in there,” he says. “I just threw my hands. That can tell me how good my hands are.”
Albert Pujols is the best young hitter in baseball because he has great hands and is obsessive about preparing. He has a pregame routine that includes extensive batting-cage work and watching at least 40 minutes of video. He checks out his swing from the day before, and he checks the opposing pitcher he is about to face.
“What I try to do is see how he pitches, how his ball is moving, what he does with men in scoring position, early in the count, late in the count,” Pujols says. “When I come out at 5 o’clock to hit [batting practice], I have my game plan ready. That’s what I’m working on out there in B.P.”
The approach he takes at the plate depends on the pitcher, but there’s one absolute: He never looks for inside fastballs. If he gets one, he trusts his hands to react.
In the first half last season, he hit only .280 as National League pitchers pounded him inside. That ended when he hit .335 with a league-leading 61 RBIs after the break.
Pujols’ preparation never ends. When he’s on deck, he gets almost completely behind the plate, a perfect place to pick up any late-breaking news about what a pitcher is doing that day. If Pujols sees something that contradicts his game plan, he’s more than willing to change. It’s not uncommon for Pujols and other Cardinals to run back to the video room during a game to get a look at their last at-bats.
Pujols has weaknesses. He’s terribly slow, but he can’t do much about that. He names two areas he needs to work on. One is staying back on off-speed pitches. The other is laying off the first pitch, although the numbers don’t entirely back that up as a weakness. In Pujols’ career, he’s a .322 first-pitch hitter. This season, he’s hitting .406 on the first pitch.
Lewis Shaw, a scout, saw Pujols play in the minors and watched video of him in several series this season, looking for holes. There aren’t many, and there is little margin for error because Pujols is an excellent mistake hitter.
“If you hang it, he’ll bang it,” Shaw says.
Karaff says a friend of his in the business offered another suggestion to get Pujols out: “Throw the ball down the middle of the plate, and he’ll pop it up.” The friend was only half serious, but the point is obvious: Pujols covers the entire plate.
“If I left here and went to another ballclub,” Page says, “and they said, `How would you pitch Pujols?’ I’d say, `Very carefully.”‘
Albert Pujols is the best young hitter in baseball because he has great hands, prepares obsessively and produces consistently by making adjustments. A swing is a symphony of the feet, legs, hips, shoulders, arms, wrists, hands and eyes. Just as a good conductor knows his musicians so well he hears when just one of them is flat, Pujols knows his swing so well he feels his own mistakes.
“He’s low-maintenance for me,” Page says. “He knows exactly what he’s doing wrong.”
Within a game, and even within an at-bat, Pujols makes adjustments based on how the pitcher is working him. When Pujols makes an out, he looks for pitchers to work the same spot again. When he faces a pitcher a second time in a game, his average is .418, compared with .398 the first time.
At least twice this season, Pujols has looked baffled in early at-bats only to hit a home run later in the game against the same pitcher–once against Prior, another time against the Expos’ Claudio Vargas on May 3. Vargas stymied Pujols in his first two appearances, which included a strikeout. In his third at-bat, Pujols worked a 3-1 count, looking for–and getting–a fastball middle in.
“If it would’ve been a fastball middle out, I would’ve taken it,” Pujols says. He hit a 452-footer.
Because he adjusts so well, nobody can figure out how to get him out regularly. Through his first two seasons, only one National League team held him below .279 (Giants, .262). He hit safely in all 52 of the Cardinals’ series last year. He has had only one series without a hit this season–and he had only two at-bats in that series because of an elbow injury.
Pujols is the only player ever to bat .300, hit 30 homers, knock in 100 runs and score 100 runs in each of his first two seasons. Entering the weekend, he was hitting .379 and was on pace for 42 home runs, 133 RBIs and 135 runs. He led the Cardinals in each of those categories the last two seasons.
Albert Pujols is the best young hitter in baseball because he has great hands, prepares obsessively, produces consistently by making adjustments and has excellent vision. He says his eyesight is 20-10.
“They’re as good as they can be,” he says. That helps him pick up a pitcher’s release point and the seams on the ball for pitch recognition.
Albert Pujols is the best young hitter in baseball because he has great hands, prepares obsessively, produces consistently by making adjustments, has excellent vision and is mature beyond his years. Pujols is not among those surprised by his incredible early success. He trusts his physical ability. Just as important, he never has been overwhelmed by the attention and pressure during his rapid ascent. That steadiness comes from his Christian faith, says Phillip Hunter, Pujols’ pastor.
“Of course, there are great ballplayers without a faith in Christ,” Hunter says. “Albert’s faith, though, defines how he deals with success and failure and how he approaches the game.”
Pujols handles his success by giving credit to God and handles failure with determination to do better. As a superstar in baseball-mad St. Louis, Pujols, a born-again Christian, knows his behavior comes under scrutiny. Already married with a son and a stepdaughter when he made his big-league debut at 21, Pujols has no use for the off-the-field distractions that follow young athletes. Baseball is important, but Pujols puts it third behind God and family, which is not to say he’s not the hardest worker on the team.
“I don’t want to throw this opportunity away,” he says. “I don’t want to be lazy in this game. I don’t want to be cocky. I don’t want to think that I’m the best. I always want to be humble and be the same guy I was three or four years ago, when I signed, through the minor leagues and here in the big leagues.”
Albert Pujols is the best young hitter in baseball because has great hands, prepares obsessively, produces consistently by making adjustments, has excellent vision, is mature and is never satisfied. He put together perhaps the best first two seasons in the history of the game, and this year looks to be better than those two. Still, he never seems completely content with what he has accomplished.
Consider this story. In 2000, Pujols was tearing it up for the Cardinals’ Class A club in Peoria. Page, then a roving hitting instructor, arrived in town to work on problems the hitters were having. On a board, Page wrote hitters’ names with the times he wanted to meet with them. Pujols was hitting so well Page didn’t schedule him, but Pujols insisted he needed help.
“He wasn’t happy hitting .330 or .340 in A ball, so I gave him all the work he wanted,” Page says.
In the majors, that perfectionism has continued. “He can be 4-for-4, then make an out and be angry at himself if he gave that at-bat away,” Page says. When first asked about being tough on himself, Pujols says he’s not. Later, he says: “You don’t do your job, of course, you’re going to be disappointed, you’re going to be mad. Everybody is.”
He looks mad a lot of the time. Under a pulled down brim, his natural facial expression is a glare. He’s big and muscular, he’s always carrying a bat, and he’s an intimidating presence. Imagine what it’s like when he starts swinging.
“He comes here to play every day,” Page says. “He doesn’t joke in B.P., he doesn’t joke in the field. It’s strictly business.”
That’s how Pujols is, those who know him say. When he’s working, he’s serious. And when baseball is involved, he’s always working.
“I’ve known him to go out and and hit in three different places in the same day,” Karaff says. “Every time you’d try to get hold of him, [wife] DeeDee would say he’s out hitting somewhere. He was going to succeed because that’s him. That’s his work ethic–his determination to play.”
