Quote:
Originally Posted by rats60
There is no conflict. Pujols was the Angels DH those two years. His job was only to hit and he wasn't very good at it. In 2016 he had an OPS+ of 116. In 2017 he had an OPS+ of 80 that is why he had a negative WAR. If the Angels didn't owe him 140 million dollars, they would have released him and he would have been out of baseball.
Mark hit on the point I was making, Pujols was a good player, but not in the class of Wagner, Cobb, Johnson or Williams. Wagner had an 8.1 WAR season at age 38. Williams had a 9.7 WAR season at age 38. Cobb hit .378 with an OPS+ of 171 at age 38. Johnson won a pitching triple crown at age 36.
At age 37 Pujols was a full time DH with an OPS+ of 80 and WAR of minus 2. He would have OPS+ seasons of 91, 92, 79 and 66 before the Angels released in the final year of his contract. The next season when Pujols need to perform to get at bats, he was suddenly an OPS+ 153 hitter after coasting for a decade in Anaheim collecting 240 million dollars from the Angels.
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I would agree that the metrics tell the real story but yes there's a conflict, because if you just look at the counting stats you might think he had a couple of pretty good seasons. I think we're saying the same thing just semantics. As we've discussed many times, the RBI totals are inflated because he was hitting behind a man with a truly scary on base percentage, Mike Trout.
All that said though, I think his legacy will be strong.