The eyes are angry. Something has gone wrong with the precisely controlled swing of Albert Pujols. A ball he knows he should have hit hundreds of feet is instead drifting lazily over the shortstop, about to be caught. And though this late-season game has come to mean nothing, the at-bat pointless, he is displeased.
He grabs the brim of his batting helmet with giant fingers, and with the snap of a wrist he hurls it to the ground. Then he walks away.
There is a way the St. Louis Cardinals first baseman, perhaps the best hitter in the game right now, walks when he is displeased or deep in thought. He stomps. His face burns. He quietly seethes.
“To get better, you have to get angry,” he says. “You have to take this seriously. I’ve always had that anger as a player. I always say, `Why do you want to change what’s working for you?’ I don’t want to change the way I am.”
In many ways, Pujols is a mystery. St. Louis is in the playoffs for the fifth time in six years, and it is clear that Pujols has had a great deal to do with the last four of those appearances. Yet in many ways he remains an unknown and underappreciated commodity.
The man with enormous arms that look like smokestacks spilling from his Cardinals jersey has torn the National League to pieces. Just 25, he has already put up statistics that are astounding. In five seasons, he has never hit lower than .314, smashed fewer than 34 home runs or had fewer than 117 RBIs.
Only three other players have had 100 RBIs in each of their first five seasons: Ted Williams, Joe DiMaggio and Al Simmons. These Hall of Famers are his parallels. There are no others.
The eyes are angry again. An unexpected visitor wants to ask questions. The slugger does not handle such intrusions well. He shouts, he curses, he growls.
“No!” he yells and struts away, a large, sleeveless T-shirt looking very small on his gargantuan body.
It is much later, after the game, when he apologizes, offering a hand the size of a first baseman’s mitt and saying he does not like distractions.
And it is clear moments into the conversation that there is an order to Pujols’ approach. There is work to be done, balls to hit, pitchers to study. He does not have time for anything that takes him from those things.
There is sincerity in the moodiness. Today’s players are savvy about things such as money and awards. When a Most Valuable Player or Cy Young Award is looming, they can become almost one-man marketing firms, all but handing out information sheets complete with pie charts and statistical analysis.
Pujols glares. He says to come back another day.
“It’s not about myself,” he says. “What can I do to help my team win? What do I need the other stuff for? I don’t care about the attention. My name isn’t real high, and that’s fine.”
Then he laughs and begins dropping his hand in front of his chest.
“Keep me low! Keep me low!” he says. “Let me do my thing and help my team.”
The manager is angry too. Tony La Russa is standing on the field before a recent game, shaking his head at what he views as a disgrace. Once again, his first baseman is in the top five of almost every significant offensive category, and yet again, he is almost assuredly not going to win the MVP award. Atlanta’s Andruw Jones is favored.
“I think there are a couple of perceptions that get misrepresented about him,” La Russa says. “The most important is that he’s surrounded by this powerhouse team. The fact is he’s surrounded by a very good team, but this isn’t last year’s team. Guys aren’t pitching to him in this order. He leads the league in intentional walks.”
La Russa is asked if he feels he has to campaign for Pujols because St. Louis is a smaller Midwestern market.
“He’s a player the whole game has overlooked,” La Russa said. “He runs to win games, but it’s not just the stolen bases. (Pujols has 16, remarkable for a player with his power.)
“He’s playing defense like a Gold Glover. He’s become as much as anything our spiritual leader. At the end of the day, you look at the game and he’ll have two hits and two RBI but he’s also done something to move the runners over and help us to win.”
A few weeks ago, La Russa called Pujols the best young hitter of any he has ever managed, and this is a man who has coached Jose Canseco, Mark McGwire, Rickey Henderson and Carlton Fisk. He will not back off that statement.
“If they were watching this guy play every day, they would say it too,” La Russa says. “He’s the most complete of all those guys.”
