Los Angeles Angels first baseman Albert Pujols made history last night when he became just the 26th member of the ever-exclusive 500-home run club and the first to drive his 499th and 500th out of the park in the same ball game.
“To have more than 19,000 players who wore a big league uniform and to have only 26 players to do this, it’s pretty special,” Pujols said after the Angels’ 7-2 victory over the Nationals.
It’s more than pretty special. But do we even care?
The answer, unfortunately, is no. Pujols may have accomplished a feat that the 1 percent of all Major League baseball players can claim to have done, but he did so in an era where it’s no longer appreciated and will always have a cloud hanging over it.
“I don’t know what has happened.” Hall of Fame president Jeff Idelson told USA TODAY Sports. “It should be front and center. There have almost been 18,000 players who have played our game, and only 25 have hit 500 homers.
“We’ve had a string of power hitters achieve the mark in the past decade, but that shouldn’t diminish how big of a mark it really is.”
Pujols now joins a club that features frowned-upon names like Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Rafael Palmeiro, and Gary Sheffield, all of whom have been linked to performance-enhancing drugs over the past decade. Pujols has been linked to steroids, and really, it’s hard to trust a professional baseball player who has made a living hitting home runs.
Pujols has been one of baseball’s good guys throughout his career. So it’s tough when we don’t applaud when a three-time MVP and future Hall of Famer has an accomplishment that only 10 players have pulled off in the past 15 years and was once viewed as one of the ultimate pillars in the sport, one that would headline “SportsCenter” and make waves through the sports world, not take a backseat to the Raptors evening up their playoff series with the Nets or what one mock draft projects will happen among the second-round quarterbacks.
It’s truly a shame for the sport of baseball that Pujols’ feat is actually a moot point. It’s an indicator of where baseball lies within sports and what major accomplishments mean to the game in this day and age. Every individual accomplishment within baseball will forever be taken with a grain of salt because of the steroid-users of the game’s past, which inevitably have tainted all of the current players’ history making acts today and in the future.
So will we remember Tuesday, April 22 as the night Pujols smacked his 500th home run when he’s inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y.? The answer is likely no, and instead it will be just another night of baseball, one of 162 regular-season games the Angels played during the 2014 season. Ten years ago the sports world would have clamored at the sight of seeing one of baseball’s good guys reach such a historical mark, but because of the bad guys’ deeds, it’s just another chance for skepticism.
