It’s true: You can come home again, at least for Albert Pujols and the St. Louis Cardinals.
According to Derrick Goold of The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Cardinals and Pujols are finalizing a deal that would reunite the future Hall of Famer with the team that he was best with on a one-year deal. The deal will be worth $2.5 million, according to Mark Feinsand of MLB.com.
Albert Pujols could be ending his career with the St. Louis Cardinals with Adam Wainwright and Yadier Molina in 2022
As our colleague Robert Murray noted in a tweet, the reunion between the St. Louis Cardinals and Albert Pujols means that Pujols, Adam Wainwright, and Yadier Molina could all be ending their careers together in 2022.
There is a very real chance that Albert Pujols, Yadier Molina and Adam Wainwright will all finish their careers together in St. Louis. You cannot script it better than that.
— Robert Murray (@ByRobertMurray) March 28, 2022
Ironically enough, they will be managed by Oliver Marmol, who is entering his first season as the manager of the Cardinals. He is four years younger than Molina, five years younger than Wainwright, and more than six years younger than Pujols.
Pujols, who turned 42 in June, started his MLB career all the way back in 2001 with the Cardinals. He played with them until 2011 and he was, arguably, the best player in baseball for those 11 years.
He played in 1,705 games with a slash line of .328/.420/.617 with an OPS+ of 170 as a Cardinal. In that span, he finished in the top 10 in National League MVP voting in all 11 seasons with 10 top five finishes, and three MVP wins (2005, 2008-2009).
He also was an All-Star nine times, won two World Series (2006, 2011), and won six Silver Slugger Awards with the Cardinals. He joined the Angels in 2012 on a 10-year deal worth $240 million. He was with them through the start of the 2021 season but he was a shell of his former self, hitting to just a 108 OPS+ while with the Angels.
They released him in early May after he had an OPS+ of 67 in 24 games. He joined the Dodgers, where he was much better as, in 85 games, he had an OPS+ of 101.
He won’t be the former MVP that the Cardinals had a decade ago but, perhaps, he could be a good bench bat or DH for the team in one of his final seasons or, perhaps, his final MLB season.
Molina has already said that he is retiring after the 2022 season and Wainwright is “almost certainly” going to do the same so it would be a great ending to three likely Hall of Famers to all end their careers together where it all started.