Albert Pujols has returned to greatness in the last months of his career. It’s an exit that baseball almost never allows. Tom Verducci on Pujols’s 700th home run
Babe Ruth quit in May 1935 with a .181 average and a feud with the owner of his Boston Braves.
Gravity rules. Such is the commonality of falls from grace that the sight of Albert Pujols smiling broadly——while circling the bases upon hitting career home run number 700 on Friday night at Dodger Stadium was the happy picture of defiance. Pujols defied time and age, not to mention the normal downward arc of his career, with one of the most spectacular exits the baseball gods ever have permitted.
The homers Friday night pushed his season totals to 21 homers and a .530 slugging percentage. Only six other players hit 20 homers and slugged .500 in their final season: Bonds, Ruth, David Ortiz, Kirby Puckett, Will Clark and Dave Nilsson. At 42 years and 251 days, Pujols is older than all of them in their last season except for Bonds .
Bickford, his former teammate with the Dodgers, remarked after giving up the milestone homer, “He’s the nicest guy in the world. He’s a big old teddy bear.” “Since I was a little boy I was able to go to the ballpark and at Estadia Quiscaya and watch Julio Cesar Franco play, Raul Mondesi, Sammy Sosa … Winter ball and their workouts,” Pujols once told me. “Because I used to get there early enough. I had the opportunity to work at the stadium with my stepdad—he had a little store in there to sell sandwiches and Coke and beer—so I was able to have an opportunity to go early after school and watch them take BP.
“That’s something that helped me out in my career. When I got here to the states, it was amazing. In high school it was almost like playing with kids, pretty much. Everything came easy. I can understand people thought I was older because I was playing with those guys in the DR. At the age of 16 I was tearing up high school ball.”
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