Albert Pujols’ 2017 season wasn’t the worst 100-RBI season in baseball history.
That is the silver lining on his season last year: Albert Pujols was pretty terrible, and he was historically terrible for a player counted on to produce at the center of a lineup, but he wasn’t the absolute worst player to ever collect one hundred runs-batted-in:
Season
|
Name
|
HR
|
RBI
|
AVG
|
OBP
|
SLG
|
wRC+
|
2003
|
Tony Batista
|
26
|
100
|
.233
|
.268
|
.391
|
70
|
1997
|
Joe Carter
|
21
|
102
|
.234
|
.284
|
.399
|
72
|
2004
|
Tony Batista
|
32
|
110
|
.241
|
.272
|
.455
|
76
|
2017
|
Albert Pujols
|
23
|
101
|
.241
|
.286
|
.386
|
78
|
1999
|
Vinny Castilla
|
33
|
102
|
.275
|
.331
|
.478
|
78
|
1993
|
Ruben Sierra
|
22
|
101
|
.233
|
.288
|
.390
|
79
|
1990
|
Joe Carter
|
24
|
115
|
.232
|
.290
|
.391
|
80
|
1934
|
Ray Pepper
|
7
|
101
|
.298
|
.333
|
.399
|
81
|
1983
|
Tony Armas
|
36
|
107
|
.218
|
.254
|
.453
|
84
|
2006
|
Jeff Francoeur
|
29
|
103
|
.260
|
.293
|
.449
|
84
|
Judged by Weighted Runs Created Plus (wRC+), Pujols’ 2017 season made him the fourth-worst hitter to crack the century mark for runs-batted-in. Or the fifth worst, if you want to slot Vinny Castilla above him.
The other players on this list don’t give us too much cause for optimism going forward. Tony Bautista was essentially finished as a major league player after his 2004 season. Joe Carter played one more year after 1997, bouncing between two teams and doing very little for either one. Ruben Sierra was twenty-seven years old when he joined this list: he had a better year at twenty-eight and then his career spiraled away. Ray Peppers collected 101 RBI in 1934, and just 60 more over the rest of his short playing career.
Jeff Francoeur, Tony Armas, and Vinny Castilla did manage to have productive years after their ugly 100-RBI seasons, but they had age on their side. Albert Pujols is thirty-eight years old, and he’s coming off four consecutive years of declining offensive production. In 2016 Pujols was a passable designated hitter. Last year he was a distance below replacement-level production. His daily presence in the middle of the lineup card cost the Angels wins.
That last sentence was tough to write, and I suspect that is it tough for many of you to read. Albert Pujols has been one of the very best players I’ve had the pleasure to watch, and he has been, over the arc of his career, one of the easiest players to root for. He has been great, and he has been a joy.
And it might be time for the Angels to release him outright.
Let’s be realistic. The Angels have three years left with Mike Trout. They have three years of Andrelton Simmons, a legitimate MVP candidate last year. To fill out their team, they have added Justin Upton and Ian Kinsler and Zack Cozart and Chris Young, all talented players on the wrong side of thirty. They have a few years to see what they’re going to get out of Garrett Richards and Tyler Skaggs and Parker Bridwell. And, of course, the Angels won baseball’s version of the lottery when Shohei Ohtani opted to sign with them.
This is the Angels window. This is their chance, and while the presence of the Astros juggernaut is reason enough to scare any AL West team away from investing too heavily in a period of contention, the Angels are in a tricky position where they need to be doing everything they can to maximize the number of wins they can etch on the ledger this year, and next year.
And the very obvious place where they can improve their team is by getting better production at first base and DH.
The projections on Pujols going forward are fairly consistent: he will post an on-base percentage in the range of .300-.315 this year. He will have a slugging average in the range of .400. He will contribute negatively on the base paths, and nothing on defense.
It is very hard for a team expecting to contend to commit significant playing time to a player with those dimensions of skills. It is especially hard if you’re a team in a position like the one that the Angels are in: a good team stuck contending in a division with a great franchise. The Angels don’t have any kind of a cushion to play with: they have to win all the games that they can win.
And it is very difficult for a team to have a player of Albert Pujols’ credentials and cost and not play him. Albert Pujols is a first-ballot Hall-of-Famer, a player who was in the MVP conversation from the moment he hit the majors. He had 636 plate appearances last year, and all of those appearances came from the 3rd or 4th spot in the batting order. Angels Mike Scioscia hasn’t shown any sign that he realizes that Pujols’ presence in the middle of the order is a problem, because why would he? We’re talking about Albert Pujols, after all.
So the Angels are in a bind. They have a player that, by any objective measure, shouldn’t be given regular starts as a middle-of-the-order DH/1B. And they have a name whose career and contract make it extremely difficult for the team to part ways with him or reduce his playing time drastically.
It’s a difficult position for everyone involved, and I don’t want to be callous or glib about any of this. Albert Pujols has been a model citizen and a good teammate, and the Angels should do everything they can to honor their commitment to him. Running a baseball team shouldn’t ever be exclusively about the calculus of wins and losses: we are talking about human beings, after all, and we are talking about a game. There should be some space for sentiment.
But the Angels need to win now. They have less space for sentiment than any other team in baseball, not while the clock on Mike Trout is ticking. They have no room to fall victim to sunk-cost fallacies about what they owe on Pujols’ contract. The Angles are targeting a playoff run this year, and next year, and Albert Pujols doesn’t help them get any closer to that target. He lessens their chances.
It might be time for the Angels to let him go.
Dave Fleming is a writer living in western Virginia. He welcomes comments, questions, and suggestions here and at dfleming1986@yahoo.com