Albert Pujols and Josh Hamilton

[Blitz Dorsey]

What do you make of their overall awfulness? Pujols was a 1.000 OPS guy in St. Louis. He has a .732 this year.

Hamilton is even worse -- .660 OPS.

We're not talking about "small sample sizes" once we get to June. Something is seriously wrong with these guys.

Pujols crushes us and everyone else in the NL for years ... and now he's garbage? Hamilton raked for six-straight seasons (including his one in Cincinnati) and now he's a bum?

Anyone else see this coming? I sure didn't. I thought Pujols would break down the last few years of his Angels contract, but not this quickly. And Hamilton? He just looks like a shell of his former self. I don't get it.

Elephant in the room: Could these guys have been on something and then stopped once they got their big-money LTC? I hate to put it out there like that, but what else makes sense? They're not THAT old. (Course, there have always been rumors that Pujols is older than he says.)

[hebroncougar]

What do you make of their overall awfulness? Pujols was a 1.000 OPS guy in St. Louis. He has a .732 this year.

Hamilton is even worse -- .660 OPS.

We're not talking about "small sample sizes" once we get to June. Something is seriously wrong with these guys.

Pujols crushes us and everyone else in the NL for years ... and now he's garbage? Hamilton raked for six-straight seasons (including his one in Cincinnati) and now he's a bum?

Anyone else see this coming? I sure didn't. I thought Pujols would break down the last few years of his Angels contract, but not this quickly. And Hamilton? He just looks like a shell of his former self. I don't get it.

Elephant in the room: Could these guys have been on something and then stopped once they got their big-money LTC? I hate to put it out there like that, but what else makes sense? They're not THAT old. (Course, there have always been rumors that Pujols is older than he says.)

Pujols was starting to decline in STL, and they were smart enough to see that. Hamilton seems to have fallen off of a cliff. I think it's what doomsdayers said could happen because of his abuse of his body.

[Tom Servo]

There were major signs of Hamilton slowing down last year as well. The Angels simply gave big money to guys on the decline.

[RedEye]

Pujols was starting to decline in STL, and they were smart enough to see that. Hamilton seems to have fallen off of a cliff. I think it's what doomsdayers said could happen because of his abuse of his body.

StL tried really hard to resign Pujols -- they just got outbid. Sure, they were smart not to beat LA's offer, but they did put a lot of money on the table. Hindsight is 20/20 on that one. They are much better off for it, no doubt. Seems pretty normal that he's on the decline, though I certainly didn't see it coming this suddenly. I think he's playing injured, actually. He shouldn't be in the .700's for OPS.

As for Hamilton... I dunno. Part of me thinks he was skating on thin ice with his plate approach for some time, since he was so dependent on bad ball hitting. When he was younger, that seems to have worked out well for him, as his athletic ability was so superior. As he ages, though, maybe swinging at bad pitches is just making him look bad instead of like a superhero who can hit anything. I still expect him to snap out of it at some point -- but you are right, it is June.

[nmculbreth]

I didn't think they would be this bad but at the same time this is the risk you run when you give out monster deals to players on the wrong side of 30.

Pujols has been playing through nagging injuries so he gets a bit of a pass from me, but at the same time his OPS has been down every year since 2008 (1.114, 1.101, 1.011, .906, .859) and his OPS+ has been down every year as well (192, 189, 173, 148, 138). I think he still has the potential to be a very good hitter with an OPS in the .850 - .900 range but I think there is a very real possibility that the Albert Pujols that terrorized the Reds and the rest of the NL Central isn't ever coming back.

Similarly there were a lot of warning signs with Hamilton. He was incredible in the first half last season, but his numbers dropped off in the second half and those struggles have carried into this season. He swings way too much at pitches outside of the strike zone and doesn't make contact enough when he does swing at pitches outside of the zone. I kind of wonder if he has lost a little bit of bat speed and is compensating by starting to swing a bit earlier, making him more susceptible to breaking pitches.

[redhat]

There's no hard evidence, but there have been rumors for years that Pujols is older than his baseball card suggests. He's officially 33, but his rapid decline suggests he's more like 35 or 36.

And since he isn't getting any younger, his old "terrorizing" self is definitely not coming back.

[CySeymour]

Pujols has also been injured this season. He can barely run due to an injured foot.

[RedEye]

Pujols has also been injured this season. He can barely run due to an injured foot.

Maybe it's time for him to get it fixed. Doesn't look like LAA are going anywhere this season anyway, right?

[CySeymour]

Maybe it's time for him to get it fixed. Doesn't look like LAA are going anywhere this season anyway, right?

True, but that's the Angels problem, not the Reds

[RedsManRick]

Josh Hamilton has managed to turn himself in to Juan Fransisco.

Pujols, meanwhile, has a .242 BABIP despite a healthy LD% and just an 11% HF/FB.

Not that I'm a huge believe in guys being fast/slow starters, but this is interesting:

[jhiller21]

Pujols was starting to decline in STL, and they were smart enough to see that. Hamilton seems to have fallen off of a cliff. I think it's what doomsdayers said could happen because of his abuse of his body.

The Cards offered him a huge deal, he declined and took the bigger deal with the Angels. Cards got lucky on that one.

[oneupper]

There's no hard evidence, but there have been rumors for years that Pujols is older than his baseball card suggests. He's officially 33, but his rapid decline suggests he's more like 35 or 36.

And since he isn't getting any younger, his old "terrorizing" self is definitely not coming back.

There is enough "soft" and circumstantial evidence to seriously doubt Albert's official age (or identity). Tejada, Furcal, Leo Nuñez, Fausto Carmona and literally hundreds of others did the trick. You have to entertain the possibility that some got away with it, possibly Albert.

I'm also seriously thinking that the reported Cardinals offer for him could have been a concerted ploy concocted by AP and the Cards, allowing Pujols to get the offer he did from the Angels while the Cardinals saved faced for "trying".

[Falcon7]

Albert ended up last year with .285, 50 2b, 30 hr, and 105 rbi. After a horrible start and a bad Sept. Injury is a big factor for him this year. And if he is 35 or 36 the decline would pretty much be the norm.
Hamilton has been on a sharp decline for about a whole year now, who knows why?

[cincinnati chili]

There is enough "soft" and circumstantial evidence to seriously doubt Albert's official age (or identity). Tejada, Furcal, Leo Nuñez, Fausto Carmona and literally hundreds of others did the trick. You have to entertain the possibility that some got away with it, possibly Albert.

I'm also seriously thinking that the reported Cardinals offer for him could have been a concerted ploy concocted by AP and the Cards, allowing Pujols to get the offer he did from the Angels while the Cardinals saved faced for "trying".

I don't mean to sound naive, but why hasn't someone come forward with "hard" evidence of this? He's not exactly obscure, and there is a huge monetary incentive for someone to bring forth such evidence to break the story. One person with a photograph of his first grade class, etc.

[oneupper]

I don't mean to sound naive, but why hasn't someone come forward with "hard" evidence of this? He's not exactly obscure, and there is a huge monetary incentive for someone to bring forth such evidence to break the story. One person with a photograph of his first grade class, etc.

That's a valid point. I asked myself the same question over and over in a different case and story (the Allen Stanford fraud), and only later was it revealed that there had been multiple inquiries and whistleblowers over almost twenty years but they were quietly put to rest one way or another.
Why hasn't someone uncovered this? I asked myself. It turns out they had, but I didn't have any way to know about it.

The monetary gain for uncovering something like this is hardly "huge". It amounts to what some news service might want to pay for it. Perhaps not even enough to cover the cost of a complete fishing expedition. There would have to be some other kind of motivation (due diligence for a contract, for example)

On the other hand, the monetary gain to be had by covering up the issue, is very large indeed.
I'm pretty sure that if you went to the DR (and someone surely has gone) to find AP's birth certificate, you will find one that has his name and birthdate, just as advertised. It will contain, however, no biometric information, as such these things rarely do.

That piece of paper is useless. It could belong to someone else, even a deceased sibling, etc. etc... or be faked. My Venezuelan mother in law has the documents to prove that she is only 76 (passport, birth certificate, national id). I know otherwise.

So going after something like this would require a whole lot more than just looking up Albert's "long form". Maybe someone did it and found nothing. Maybe they found information worth a lot of money. But it hasn't been made public. What's more, many of the "age-cheaters" were only found out when they themselves came clean or after intensive detective work.

So yes, the lack of "hard" evidence that he may be cheating on his age should be considered. But there is also a lack of hard evidence that he is not.
A youth picture that can be time-dated. School records. Independent third party corroboration of some of his early life factoids. As far as I know, there's nothing of the sort. Not a single polaroid. Classmate or sandlot testimonies. Nada. The answer is he was too poor to have pictures or go to school? Poor people in the dominican republic in the '80s and '90s took pictures.
Albert pretty much came out of nowhere, to be better than anyone at an earlier age than anyone.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist. Really. But I have learned to be skeptical. If it sounds too good to be true, you have to ask yourself, if there is something else going on.

The fairy-tale story may check out, but I consider other scenarios much more probable.