That was a pretty fun game. Patrick Mazeika tapped in the game-winning run in the bottom of the 10th in his second-ever major-league at-bat.
Ten strikeouts through 4 innings pitched for Max Scherzer, this guy is good.
Scherzer was dominant, but Brad Hand shit the bed. Hilarious!
Phat Albert has (quietly) left the building.
https://sports.yahoo.com/trout-says-broke-down-over-184016267.html
When Pujols signed his mega deal with Anaheim, he had just finished a world series in which he crushed three homers in one game. But he was never the same after leaving St Louis. He still had power but his contact hitting, which is what made him so formidable, declined not long after his switch.
Pujols just dropped off a cliff when he signed with the Angels and hasn’t been relevant for some time, his glory days seem so far in the past.
That’s one strike against him for a team to sign him. I’m not sure he can even sell tickets these days.
Josh Bell really needs to be sent down to AAA to figure his shit out. A .135 hitter in the lineup doesn’t help anyone.
I have no idea what the rules are about sending a veteran down, but he’s in an awful slump and Ryan Zimmerman isn’t the answer on a daily basis.
Schwarber is another who can’t get out of his own way. If he was still a catcher, his .190 average and hitting stats would barely be acceptable, as an outfielder it’s a disgrace.
Plus, the Nats still have Carter Kieboom trying to figure things out in the minors after being a flop in the big leagues.
I guess it’s good that Victor Robles has turned it around somewhat.
You can’t waste a 14 strikeout performance and Scherzer is in a contract year.
The Mets are finally engaging in some smart, aggressive base-running for the first time in years, and it’s paying off. First in the NL East, baby!
Now just keep doing that right up through the end of the World Series and we’re set. 
A crazy number I saw was that after leaving the Cardinals his career BA was .328. It’s now under .300 (since he left it’s been .256).
Or to user a more advanced offensive statistic - in STL his OPS+ was 170, since then it’s 108. He basically went from the best hitter in baseball to league average. And as pointed out he’s been well below average for the last 5 years.
A sad, but predictable, ending (assuming it is the end) to the best player I ever saw play for my home team.
Pujols’s 11 year career in St. Louis alone would have put him in the Hall of Fame: 86.6 WAR and an OPS of 1.037. Five or six years in LA would have been fine. Instead, he only added 12.9 WAR in those ten years and gets remembered as a ghost of the great player he was.
The Ryan Zimmerman that’s batting .304/.339/.554 with 6 HRs, or a different one?
Even more disgraceful as an outfielder is his outfielding. He’s reason enough to argue for a universal DH.
I also don’t understand how Robles still has just a single RBI. I don’t like it as a stat, but it is indicative of at least some situational success. He’s had 66 plate appearances with at least one man on base.
I wish he would have retired a few years ago. I’m a lifelong Cards fan. Didn’t take long to realize that they made the right decision to let him go.
What happens with such things is the lousy years at the end get forgotten and history remembers the greatness.
He’s definitely the answer right now, but a guy who’s likely to retire and is used to a part time role isn’t exactly what I want to try to win the division
Looks like the early season schedule is over, most teams had lots of off days scheduled. But, starting today, things kick into high gear and days off will be much fewer and far between.
There’s no perfect solution, but I’m sure teams hate having to use a rare off day in August to make up a snowed out April game
I was living in St. Louis during first the McGwire and then the Pujols eras. Went to a LOT of games and saw a lot of highlight reel monster hits. Their memories are still very much sainted there.
Pujols in Los Angeles? Not so much. All promise and little delivery, most of which was real early after the move.
Posterity and baseball at large will record Pujols as a true great; unlike McGwire one untainted by the prohibited substances asterisk.
Angels fans? They’ll remember their disappointment and little more.
An interesting side issue is what really happened with the decision for Albert to go to LAA. How much did he want to leave, how much did La Russa want to get rid of him, how much did either know or suspect about his impending decline? What did LAA believe they were getting and where they fooled or just unlucky? How much was it just about balancing the salary books versus about building the best team at either end of the trade, etc.?
I don’t generally follow the “soap opera” part of any sport, but as a fan in the stands I was close enough to this big surprise as it occurred to wonder to this day what the flies on the wall would have heard.
Pujols a possible Olympian? That would be a much better swan song than a DFA announcement.
Why do you think La Russa wanted to get rid of him (or that it would have mattered if he did)? La Russa was retiring himself at the end of the 2011 season. And from what I’ve heard, there was always only mutual respect between La Russa and Pujols. (Although I remember La Russa saying something to the effect that St. Louis’s most indispensible player was, not Pujols, but Molina; and I think history has proved him right about that.)
I don’t think anyone in St. Louis wanted Pujols to leave. I think GM John Mozeliak was disappointed when Albert signed with the Angels. But the Angels just made a better offer than the Cardinals were willing or able to make; and my impression was that Pujols was swayed by the offer, not just because of the money, but because of the respect that such a big contract implied.
Nobody expected Pujols to be as good during those ten years as he was during his first ten. The Angels were paying, not just for Pujols’s ability as a ballplayer, but for his fame, and for the records he was going to set in an Angels uniform.
And I don’t think much of anybody has been surprised by how far Pujols has declined, though it’s been more than more optimistic people suspected. I don’t know how much has been inevitable decline due to sheer age, and how much is due to injuries and health issues.
Thank you. Good info overall.
To clarify one item, I had no particular impression that La Russa wanted to get rid of Pujols. Certainly in public they were always speaking well of each other. Both when they were on the same team and afterwards.
What I was trying to say was that something was the impetus that actually moved Pujols. If it was simply the attractive power of a big contract that STL couldn’t / wouldn’t match that’s fine. That was certainly the main public story. But if there were other additional causes I wanted to know what they were.
Probably. Baseball as a whole won’t, though. Posterity recalls greatness and forgets mediocrity.
La Russa left St. Louis at the same time so I don’t think his opinion mattered. Mike Matheny took over before the 2012 season.
St. Louis apparently did offer at least two deals, and reportedly one was for $210 million over ten years, as opposed to the $254 million over ten years the Angels offered. So they did make an honest effort to keep him, and one can certainly understand why they weren’t willing to get into an auction with Arte Moreno.