Indeed I did!
You know, I always thought Albert was a bit chunky (not fat, like Prince Fielder), but a guy who had a belly that would only get bigger with age, and wear down his knees. Seeing that picture shows how wrong I am. I’m not close to St. Louis baseball, but my guess is that the uniform he wears is so baggy, maybe I just assumed he was hiding some flab in those baggy shirts and pants.
My apologies to Mr. Pujols. You are not an overweight power hitter.
He **must **be using HGH then. 
They’re the favorites to win it all, I’d say (as of today).
i suspect it will be similar to the Mets signing Piazza. Pujols will never be quite as good as he was for the Cardinals, and the last couple of seasons will be expensive right had, but he will provide enough value that in the end the Angels will think it was worth doing.
Difference being, the Mets needed Piazza to be an everyday catcher the full length of his contract, and when he began to fizzle out in year 4 or 5 they kept batting him cleanup, even when he was obviously a #5 or #6 or even #7 kind of batter. The Angels will be able to put Pujols at DH, and I think they’re smart enough to recognize that a guy who hits .275 and 20 HRs a year can play, just not at cleanup for a pennant-winning team.
To my surprise I’m agreeing with Elvisl1ves. The Angels basically paid what it required to get Albert in 2012, 2013, and 2014, with an eye to beating the Rangers by adding Pujols and C.J. Wilson. If Wilson is healthy that’s a monstrous amount of value being added.
That Pujols didn’t have a great 2011 (although most of his slump was at the beginning of the season) is perhaps illustrative of the point; when Albert Pujols has a BAD year, he’s still as good a player as Prince Fielder. In terms of risk, the Angels signed basically the lowest risk player in baseball for 2012; even at 32, Pujols’s low end expectation is “a really, really good hitter, and by the way a good fielder too.” This will make the Angels a better team. If it only makes them better by 3 or 4 games that will be a little disappointing but it’s still good, and it could make them better by a lot more than that.
This deal could be a horrible anchor in 2019, but as has been pointed out, it’s Arte Moreno’s money, and this is a move designed to win today. The Angels are rich and getting richer and for all we know by 2019 $25 million might not be that much.
There is hope for you yet, isn’t there? The personal snark stuff, such as that, still needs more work, though.
Why is the notion that you can actually build a team to win the Series, not merely to hope to make the playoffs, so alien to some?
The tail end of the contract could be paid for with him chasing records. Even if he’s only hitting 20HRs a year as a DH, the club will probably sell a good amount of season tickets and get a few more dollars on a TV contract if he is able to make a play for a “clean” HR record.
Unfortunately, the thing that drives ticket sales more than anything else is a good won/loss record, specifically playoff appearances. Making big free agent signings or players chasing records doesn’t make much of a difference (if any).
In most markets that is true, but LA has more than its share of fans just waiting to join a bandwagon. I read that season ticket sales are already up a significant amount for next season. And the new TV deal that allows them to spend like this is nuts. The more I think about it the more sense this move makes for a team like The Angels. It would make a lot less sense for other teams, but the Angels are in the perfect position to make this move.
The Angels were very close to capacity anyway, and that in a season when they were out of the race most of the time. There really aren’t many more tickets to sell.
This is out of line. If you’re posting to criticize another user or make personal comments of this nature, that has no place in this forum. Even viewed in the most charitable light, it’s off-topic and very likely to hijack a thread if responded to in kind. Take it to the Pit if you feel you must, but keep comments like this out of The Game Room.
Anybody changed their minds about this, given the horrendous start?
The entire offense is dismal
012 REGULAR SEASON RANKINGS
RUNS
162 26th Overall
BATTING AVERAGE
.248 15th Overall
ON BASE PERCENTAGE
.304 25th Overall
SLUGGING PCT
.373 23rd Overall
C.J. Wilson seems pretty solid:
ERA W-L SO WHIP
2.90 5-4 54 1.15
I saw the Angels play in San Diego last week. As is usual when LA teams visit San Diego the visiting fans outnumbered the San Diego fans. There was a fair amount of booing when Pujols came up to bat. I don’t think it was the San Diego fans booing. So I think the Angles fans are pretty disappointed with Pujols so far.
Of course it looks bad right now, but he’s Albert Pujols. He will turn it around. He will probably not earn the money they’re paying him over the course of the contract, but that’s something everybody knew when he signed.
The start he got off to was really shocking even though his numbers have been in decline for a couple of seasons. He seems to be turning it around now, and it goes without saying that he has not been their only problem on offense. He should still give them some really good years, and judging a 10-year contract based on two months is not going to work. Even if he’d been killing it for two months, we’d still know that it’s only two months out of 10 seasons and that over time he’ll decline and be worth far less than $24 million a year late in this decade.
His batting average ten games ago was .212. Now it’s .209. He’s hit three more homers in those games but that’s the only good thing you can say about him.
After 44 games Pujols has been flat out terrible and the peripherals are not promising; his K/W rate is the worst it’s even been, no power, no average. It’s very alarming.
Watch some of the breakdowns of his swing and take a look at some of the hit charts that are coming out and you will see that a lot of stuff he used to crush is turning into ground balls and foul balls. To me that says his bat speed is down, which is going to happen as he gets older. He can adjust, but I don’t think he is ever really going to be the same.
Last week I saw a little video analysis that suggests he’s not getting as much traction with his back foot. He’s definitely swinging at more pitches out of the strike zone because he’s pressing and he seems to have lost balance. Combine all of that and you have a mess. Meanwhile today he’s 3-for-3 with a homer, for whatever that’s worth.
It’s hard to separate a loss of physical ability from a guy who’s just pressing and out of sync. Four weeks ago Jose Bautista looked awful, but he was his own worst enemy and was just out of sorts. Now all of a sudden he looks great again. It could be Pujols just needs a few good games to get into a groove.
Still, you have to think the Angels are panicking. They have a huge amount of money tied up in a small number of players. Vernon Wells is a disaster. Even they can’t afford too many of those.
Wells had had several disastrous years under that contract when they traded for him. I still don’t get that one.