You've got to love a good baseball story about late bloomers. There's a handful of guys who were seemingly never too good in the first place before a late-career surge came out of nowhere and thrust them into prominence.
How about Frank Howard, who hit 162 home runs over the first nine seasons of his career before turning 30, and then proceeded to whack 172 home runs over the next four years? How about Dave Stewart, who went 39-40 with a 3.97 ERA to start his career before turning 30, and then went 84-45 with a 3.20 ERA over the next four seasons? Look at Jose Bautista, who never topped 20 home runs in a season until he turned 29 and decided to casually lead the league with 54. There's his former teammate, Edwin Encarnacion, who also never presented a major power threat at the dish until his age-29 season, at which point he became a perennial 35-40 home run threat.
And then there's Albert Pujols, who is pretty much the exact opposite of a late bloomer. In his first ten seasons, he recorded 1,900 hits, 408 home runs, and a .331/.426/.624 slash line. Over the next 10, he had 1,336 hits, 254 home runs, and a .262/.319/.459 slash line. Not horrible, but not nearly the same player. Some legitimately bad seasons of late — he posted a -1.4 WAR from 2017 to 2020 — made us accept that Pujols never really would be anywhere near the power-hitting threat he had been throughout his younger days.
Then, 2021 came along, and Joe Maddon is comparing what we're seeing to a unique movie character who didn't exactly follow the typical timeline. It's not a late bloomer... it's a late re-bloomer?
Yeah — he's on pace for 38 home runs. He's 41 years old and hasn't cleared the 25 home run mark since 2016. And it's still really, really early, but man is he turning back the clock with some of his at-bats.
Heck, he's even stealing bases out here!
Not all is Benjamin Button-esque about Pujols' 2021 campaign to this point. He's still struggling to hit for average (.220) or get on base (.279) at a consistent level. But if he can produce as a player in an Adam Dunn or Mark Reynolds-type role — again, he's 41 years old, though some people are skeptical — that would be perfectly acceptable, in my mind, to the Angels.
Besides, if he does hit 38 home runs, he'll wind up at exactly 700 at the end of the season, and that's just too good a story line to not at least explore a little bit. I didn't even mention that home run total — because I really didn't even consider it a possibility — in my list of milestones to keep an eye on ahead of the 2021 season. But here we are, and I hope he (and you all) will accept this as my apology.
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