Prince Albert Pujols, he reigneth

lol WARP3

not sure how accurate it is to say his OBP has been "driven" by IBBs when the guy averaged 130 walks a season

Alex's statement sounded odd to me too, but I checked, and he's right--a high percentage of Pujols' walks have been intentional over his career. Here are the top 26 HR guys (everyone with 500+, plus Pujols) reordered according to their IBB/BB percentages:

Banks -- 0.275 (missing first two seasons)
Bonds -- 0.269
Pujols -- 0.258
Aaron -- 0.213 (missing first season)
McCovey -- 0.193
Griffey -- 0.188
Murray -- 0.167
Sosa -- 0.166
Manny -- 0.163
Ted Williams -- 0.160 (last six seasons only)
Frank Robinson -- 0.154
Mays -- 0.145 (missing first three seasons)
Schmidt -- 0.133
Palmeiro -- 0.127
Reggie Jackson -- 0.119
McGwire -- 0.114
Killebrew -- 0.103 (missing first season)
Frank Thomas -- 0.101
Thome -- 0.099
Mathews -- 0.091
Sheffield -- 0.088
Mantle -- 0.087 (missing first four seasons)
A-Rod -- 0.074
Ruth -- n/a
Foxx -- n/a
Ott -- n/a

(My way of avoiding the drudgery of marking book reports.)

Obviously overall lineup strength plays a part in this (significant, I would guess), and also prevailing managerial strategies through the years, but holy cow, Banks--I would have bet my house on Bonds having the highest percentage. And lineup aside, Mantle's figure is weirdly low. Williams' figure is only for his age 36-41 seasons; bet he was up around 20% in his prime.

Pujols has only drawn 100 walks three times in his career, and never more than 115 in a season. Over a quarter of them have been intentional.

Trivia question I tripped over in a article about his impending 500th: who was slated to play left field for the Cardinals the year he broke in?

Cabrera's 0.225 would place him fourth on that list.

Trivia question I tripped over in a article about his impending 500th: who was slated to play left field for the Cardinals the year he broke in?

Lou Brock

Oh, wait -- you said "broke in," not "born."

Brock was slated to play left field for the Jays this year, but no.

oh i feel like we've had this conversation before -- on bbref, the BB columnn includes IBBs, right? that's confusing

Yes.

Mario Mendoza -- 0.077 (Mantle/A-Rod territory)...which may or may not say something about how meaningful a stat this is.

xposts bobby bonilla, right?

Well done. Found that a little disorienting.

I was going to guess Andy Van Slyke.

Banks IBB #s hugely inflated cuz Cubs both stunk and he didn't walk a huge amount otherwise. Unlike Bonds who did.

hit 499th in 1st in DC

His 500th in the 5th. Congrats!

PUJOLS BACK

weird: looking at pujols' career defensive numbers, bbref has him as a huge plus (not including the positional adjustment), which is how i've always thought of him, while fangraphs has him as a huge minus

are you looking at the "DEF" line on fg? that includes position

right, but on bbref he's +25 runs above average in the field (including position) where on FG he's -70

i mean i get that they use different methods but that's a huge difference

yeah BBRef uses DRS and FG uses UZR, i guess they have some different ideas

fwiw pujols has the highest UZR on record for a 1b. i think it only goes back to 2002 but still.

http://espn.go.com/blog/jayson-stark/post/_/id/769/appreciating-albert-pujols

just read about this, congrats.

"Only 26 of the thousands of men who have played in the major leagues have ever reached that milestone. At 34, he is the third-youngest to do so."

not sure about that last part however. :-)

i feel like people deal a certain amount of schadenfreude or at least snarkiness about his past two years, or at least LAA's incompetence, but i'm always rooting for him and i still hope he ends up with 700 homers

he's a lot easier to root for now that he's out of the NL Central ;)

I'd have to figure the HR friendly NL Central Parks probably never hurt Pujols. At least he got to take Minute Maid with him to LA so that every time the Angels go there they can show him hitting that moonshot against Brad Lidge.

http://pbs.twimg.com/media/BmAkwHZCcAEzLUL.jpg

after hitting a walk-off homer to win the 2000 pcl championship

I met Jered Weaver's father-in-law today.

father of tacos

did you ask him if he really wanted his daughter to marry jeff

i ate 10 tacos next to jeff weaver last night

2,500th hit, 1,500th run, go-ahead double in the 9th.

35 today

seven years, $189m left on contract

http://images.45cat.com/ike-and-tina-turner-its-gonna-work-out-fine-london.jpg

Passed Jimmie Foxx on the HR list today, will pass Mantle soon. In other news, a shadow of his former self.

23 hr now. He's been a pretty impressive shadow lately, against all odds and prognostication.

Apr 6 to May 16, 2015 34 games 29/130 16 r 6 hr 14 rbis 18k 9bb .223 .277 .392
May 17 to Jun 24, 2015 36 games 43/135 30 r 17 hr 33 rbis 9k 14bb .319 .391 .741

I think Thomas without the walks is ending up being a pretty apt analogy offensively although everything I see kinda indicates he's still keeping his strong defensive skills (which obv Thomas never had). As long as you don't look at the contract, he's still got value.

aren't the angels uber rich anyway?

They are, but even so I'm sure they wish they were paying for Pujols 2000-2009 not the current incarnation.

He seems to have turned a bunch of doubles into home runs--his doubles are down from '14 and '12 almost in lockstep with the HR surge. Otherwise, he looks to be the same player he's been since arriving in California. Which is fine. He should be able to bulk up his career numbers at a reasonable level of performance for the next few years--3000/600 again looks very reachable, 2000 RBI probably.

40th hr

trout doubles, pujols homers :/ go Rangers!

agreed with the angels four years ago today

only six to go

He's been worth around 13 WAR over four years with the Angels, so at $7M/win or whatever the going rate is on the open market, he's earned his salary.

He had a .300 OBP last year and probably will be a marginal hitter by the end of his contract, but he's not been terrible. Though he still might have the worst contract in baseball considering the years and $ value still owed.

he fell off so badly in the second half of '15 I wonder if he's actually done for real this time tho

.249/.324/.416, 101 wRC+, 0.1 fWAR

only 5 and a half left to go

ouch. i didn't realize it had gotten that bad or that there was still 5+ years on that contract

Depending upon how much stock you put in the 40 HR last year, he's in his eighth year of almost uniformly straight-line decline. WARs, starting in 2009 (his career high): 9.7, 7.5, 5.3, 4.8, 2.3 (injury year; pro-rated for 155 games), 3.9, 3.1, 0.4 (also pro-rated for 155 games).