There isn’t a more dangerous hitter in baseball right than Albert Pujols.
Pujols homered twice and drove in four runs in St. Louis’ 5-3 win over Minnesota today, extending his MLB-leading totals to 28 homers and 74 RBI. It was the sixth multihomer game of the season for the Cardinals first baseman, and the reigning National League MVP is three homers away from reaching the 350-homer mark for his career, and he’s also well on his way to a career season.
Pujols’ previous career highs were 49 homers and 137 RBI, both reached in 2006, but he’s on pace for 60 homers and 159 RBI this season.
We’ve got a few more weeks to go before the All-Star break and more than three months to go in the regular season, but it’s certainly not too early to start thinking Triple Crown.
No one’s led their respective league in batting average, homers, and RBI since Carl Yastrzemski last did it in 1967, when the Red Sox legend and Hall of Famer posted a .326/44/121 season to post a clean sweep in the American League. The last National League player to win the Triple Crown was Cardinals left fielder and future Hall of Famer Joe ‘Ducky’ Medwick in 1937, when he hit .374 with 31 homers and 154 RBI.
The obstacle for Pujols is in the batting average category, where he’s hitting ‘only’ .328. He’s actually having his slowest month of the season BA-wise, with his 2 for 2 performance today bumping him up from .291 to .307 for the month.
If he wants to make up the necessary ground in batting average, he can’t have too many down months (though a down month for him is a good month for many), he’ll need to keep churning out the hits and have the likes of David Wright (who currently leads the National League in batting average) to drop back a little.
However, Pujols has always fared well in the last few months of the season, which bodes very well for his Triple Crown hopes.
Here’s a look at the post All-Star break numbers that Pujols posted in each of his first eight seasons:
2001: .336 (93 for 277), 16 HR, 64 RBI
2002: .335 (94 for 281), 13 HR, 61 RBI
2003: .346 (84 for 243), 14 HR, 38 RBI
2004: .360 (101 for 280), 24 HR, 63 RBI
2005: .320 (82 for 256), 19 HR, 48 RBI
2006: .344 (96 for 279), 20 HR, 61 RBI
2007: .349 (89 for 255), 19 HR, 51 RBI
2008: .366 (87 for 238), 19 HR, 66 RBI
So, judging by those numbers, he’s certainly capable of hitting well enough in the second half of the season to put himself in position to win the Triple Crown. Even if he doesn’t, he won’t miss by much, and even missing by a hair will likely translate into career-best home run and RBI numbers. It will also likely mean MVP #3, which will put him in pretty elite company.
But if Pujols can pull it off, it’d be pretty fitting that he be the one to do it, considering that the last National League player to accomplish the feat was also a Cardinal. Of course, it goes without saying that it’s not going to be easy for him to do it - otherwise it’d have been done more by now, right?
