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Hearing Stars
Pujols Steroid Speculation
The great Albert Pujols hits his 23rd homer in 46 games and Barry Bonds stays stuck on 714. and followed it up by saying, "I don't want to be the next Barry Bonds. I want to be Albert Pujols and that's it." Unfortunately for Prince Albert a.k.a. Phat Albert a.k.a. The Machine a.k.a. El Hombre*, any man who's on pace for 84 roundtrippers in a season is going to have to deal with accusations of using the juice.
With that in mind, we talked to Baseball Prospectus' Will Carroll on SBL two weeks ago (hear the interview) about Pujols and Bonds, among other things. A lot of the discussion centered around Pujols' brilliance and the possibility of him making a run at 73 -- "Can he hit 80? Yeah, I think so." -- but here's what Will said about the steroid speculation surrounding the St. Louis' slugger...
"I did talk to people who saw him in the Midwest League, and they said he put on about 30 pounds over the span of two years. So there's some question, but the gold standard is that he never failed a drug test."
Maybe he did put on 30 bills in the minors when he was 19, 20 years old, but so what? I put on 60 when I was 18, 19, and I definitely wasn't juicing, I was just eating Papa John's breadsticks and way too many cheeseburgers and wing dings at D-Hall. To Will's credit, though, he wasn't accusing Pujols of using performance enhancers. He was just bringing all of the facts to light, and Pujols' minor league weight gain is a pretty interesting one.
Regardless, right now The Machine is on pace for 84 HR and 207 RBI. Even if he regresses from those numbers, this could and probably should be a season for the ages -- right there with Babe Ruth in '21, Ted Williams in '41 and Bonds in '01, -- and I'm fairly certain he's doing it clean.
Related: Hardball Times posts the early season win shares All-Star team, and "Albert Pujols is King, of course. At this pace, he would rack up 56 Win Shares. The record is 59, by Honus Wagner in 1908."
* All nicknames for Pujols come from his baseball-reference.com page, which I find to be hilarious.
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5/24/06 11:49 AM
I couldn't of said it any better.
Jamie, how many games in a baseball season ... like 180 right? [sorry not a big MLB fan] so if he has 23 already, by the all-star break he should have over 50 or dang near 50 if he stays close to his pace now, right? That is going to turn even more heads then than it is right now.
I think if MLB baseball really wants to clean this all up, I mean, mop the floors with bleach and then with some pinesol to make everything smell nice and clean, they need to get rid of their crappy random drug testing. Just throw it out for the garbage man and begin a monthly [i would prefer weekly] MANDATORY steroid drug testing for EVERYONE in the league, and then we all can tell who is suspect by their reactions. I mean, if you're not juicing, then you have nothing to be pissed off about. Major League Baseball has the right to require a mandatory anything IMO to clean up their own league and get rid of any doubt that might be having a bad influence on their sport.