Albert Pujols hit grand slams of 699 and 700 off Dodgers pitchers Andrew Heaney and Phil Bickford, respectively, and pitchers 454 and 455 in his homer book with its record number of postings. He joined Barry Bonds, Henry Aaron, and Darling Ruth as the main players to reach 700. The manner in which he showed up there was the most shocking of all. Turning the clock back 10 years, Pujols’ rage to 700 throughout the course of recent months will go down as one of the extraordinary mic drops in the game’s set of experiences.
The homers Friday night pushed his season totals to 21 homers and a.530 slugging rate. Just six different players hit 20 home runs and slugged.500 in their last season: Bonds, Ruth, David Ortiz, Kirby Puckett, Will Clark, and Dave Nilsson. At 42 years and 251 days, Pujols is more established than every one of them in their last season, with the exception of Bonds (43.364).
To get to 700, Pujols hit 500 home runs off right-handed pitchers and 200 off left-handed pitchers. hit an astounding 218 home runs with two strikes, the greater part of any hitter starting around 1988 (Manny Ramirez is next at 192). So much of his vocation won’t be characterized by ever compromising that yin and yang of hitting between power and contact. There was no provision for his take. Pujols struck out multiple times as a tenderfoot — and at no point ever struck out on multiple occasions in the future, even as baseball saw a record number of strikeouts for a large number of years.
After he hit 700, Pujols slipped into a passage behind the meeting hole at Dodger Arena and sobbed.