On Sunday, Albert Pujols hit a home run, and there was much rejoicing.
There was much rejoicing, of course, because it was Prince Albert's first home run in a Los Angeles Angels uniform. It's been that kind of season for the former St. Louis Cardinals superstar, and it hasn't been fun to watch.
Pujols' track record and simple common sense suggest that he's not going to struggle all year long. He's going to get in a groove eventually, and he's going to stay in that groove all season wrong.
But before Pujols can get into a groove, he has to get out of the rut he's been in since the start of the season, and that's a whole 'nother headache.
For the sake of all of us getting on the same page, below is a complete breakdown of all the things that have gone wrong for Pujols this season.
Warning: It's not pretty.
By the Numbers
Pujols' numbers don't look good on the surface. He enters Tuesday's action with a batting line of .196/.236/.291, which is something I'd expect to see next to Tony Womack's name, not Prince Albert's.
And yes, it's also very hard to stomach the fact that Pujols has as many home runs as Cliff Pennington, Darwin Barney and Dee Gordon.
Pujols just isn't getting hits, and a key reason he's not getting hits is because he's not getting walks. In 123 plate appearances, he's walked just six times. That's a BB% of 4.9 percent, which is pretty alarming seeing as how Pujols had a BB% of 14.7 just a couple years ago in 2010.
Fewer walks, naturally, means more swings. And more swings combined with fewer walks means more bad swings.
The numbers show that Pujols has taken a ton of bad swings. Thanks to the lovely folks at FanGraphs, we know that Pujols is swinging at 39.1 percent of the pitches he sees outside the strike zone. To put that in perspective, he swung at just 18.3 percent of pitches he saw outside the strike zone in 2007, a year in which he hit .327.
Pujols is making contact with these pitches more often than not, but that's not necessarily a good thing. He's not used to being a good bad-ball hitter, and that hasn't changed this season. He's going after and making contact with a lot of pitches, but his BABIP is sagging at .220.
The truly concerning part is the direction in which Pujols is hitting balls when he puts them in play. As anyone who has watched a lot of Angels games this year can vouch, Pujols has pulled a lot of balls to the left side of the field, and it simply hasn't worked.
It's worse than you probably think. Pujols has 23 hits this season, and FanGraphs says 16 have gone to left, six have gone to center, and one has gone to right.
Yup, one hit to the opposite field all season.
Last year, 26 of Pujols' 173 hits went to right field. That's 15 percent. If he stays on his current pace, just four percent of his hits will go to the opposite field.
In case you're wondering, Baseball-Reference.com claims that zero of Pujols' hits have gone to right, which is even less encouraging.
Sadly, Pujols has been at his worst with ducks on the pond. With runners in scoring position, he's batting .174. For his career, he's a .343 hitter with runners in scoring position.
So here's the deal. When the Angels signed Pujols, they thought they were buying a patient hitter with power, one who was going to hit the ball to all fields and drive in runs.
It suffices to say that this hitter hasn't arrived yet.
The Eye Test
Okay, we know the numbers. Now we need to figure out why those numbers exist.
Those numbers exist because Pujols hasn't been himself at the plate. You know that, I know that, everyone knows that.
I'm not a hitting coach, but even I can tell that Pujols is doing things differently this season than he has in seasons past.
For starters, he's trying to pull everything. To do that, he's made a habit of trying to cheat on pitches, and that has led him to start his swing early. He's not reading and reacting. He's just reacting.
This is not vintage Pujols. Throughout his career, he's always been a hitter who would let the ball get deep in the hitting zone, and then he would uncoil with a powerful swing. If the ball was on the inside part of the plate, he would turn and drive it to left field with authority. If it was on the outside part of the plate, he'd let it travel and then drive it to right or center field.
He's abandoned this approach this season. My presumption is that it's a mental thing, but we've seen other hitters cheat on their swings and try to pull everything once they started to get old and had to deal with a loss of bat speed.
It's too early to tell, but that could be what's going on with Pujols this season.
Lest you think his home run on Sunday is going to change everything, don't be so sure. He hit it on a curveball on the outside part of the plate, and he pulled it to left field instead of going with it.
It was just a matter of time before Pujols pulled something and got lucky, and that's what happened there.
Theories for What's Wrong with Pujols:
Alien Abduction
It's always a possibility in my book. I'm sure my X-Files obsession has nothing to do with it.
Nazi Experiments
Because they're always experimenting. Jerks.
Impostor
Maybe Pujols has a twin brother, a la Jose Canseco. Or maybe this Pujols is a doppelganger hired by Pujols so he can escape the spotlight of Major League Baseball. Elvis pulled the same trick, and it worked for him for years.
Sign of the Apocalypse
It is 2012 after all.
Logical Conclusions
We can come up with a ton of wacky theories to explain Pujols' slow start, but maybe we should just keep things simple instead.
The best explanation for Pujols' struggles is also the most obvious explanation: He's trying to do too much.
You would too if you were trying to live up to a $254 million contract. You're not going to find a more humble man than Albert Pujols. He'll never brag about his own greatness. This doesn't mean he's blind to the fact that people are expecting him to be great, and he's just trying too hard to make them happy.
Furthermore, Pujols is adjusting to a new team and a new league. With all respect to Mickey Hatcher, he's not used to coaching Pujols, and he clearly hasn't been able to help all that much this season. And, indeed, it's worth noting that Pujols has already gotten annoyed with Hatcher once this season (see CBSSports.com).
What Pujols is going through right now is a very tough transition, and that has to be quite the system shock seeing as how he was used to a consistent set of circumstances during his career in St. Louis.
It's a whole new ballgame for Albert Pujols, and he's not playing it very well. What he needs is time to learn the ropes.
If we're still asking each other what's wrong with him a month from now, that's when our fingers can move closer to the panic button.
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