This column started as an attempt to compare New York Yankees’ Aaron Judge with St. Louis Cardinals legend Albert Pujols. But after a particularly long session of Baseball Reference scrolling, I decided I didn’t want to write about Judge at all. That’s because I discovered something that I’ve never heard discussed by any baseball journalists: There will never be another hitter like Pujols.
Pujols’ career rate statistics are very impressive, but they don’t remotely do him justice, since he sacrificed them in an effort to hit counting statistic milestones late in his career: 700 home runs, 3,000 hits and 2,000 RBIs. To truly understand the greatness of “The Machine,” you need to look at his peak.
From 2001 to 2011, Pujols put up one of the greatest and most consistent stretches baseball has ever seen. He slashed .328/.420/.617 and averaged 40 home runs, 41 doubles and 121 RBIs per season. Playing at that level for one season usually means you’ll run away with the MVP award, and Pujols averaged those totals over 11 seasons.
There’s one statistic I didn’t mention — one that illustrates Pujols’ greatness more than anything else. Over those 11 seasons, he struck out in just 9.5% of his plate appearances. He had 271 more walks and 211 more extra-base hits than strikeouts. For a player to have more walks or extra-base hits than strikeouts in one season is rare enough, but Pujols did both handily over 11 years.
The only players in today’s game who avoid strikeouts as well as Pujols did are contact-first hitters without much power. In 2024, there were only three players who struck less than 9.5% of the time, and they hit 27 home runs combined — fewer than Pujols averaged by himself over 11 straight years.
By the same token, the only hitters today with Pujols’ slugging ability strike out at far higher clips. Judge, currently the best hitter in the world, can match and exceed Pujols’ raw power, but he has 1,209 strikeouts and 493 extra-base hits in his career. Los Angeles Angels’ Mike Trout, the best player of his generation, has already surpassed Pujols’ career total for strikeouts in 6,394 fewer plate appearances. Even New York Mets’ Juan Soto, whose prodigious power and plate discipline earned him the largest contract in North American sports history, still struck out in over 17% of his career plate appearances.
The only players who are even remotely in Pujols’ shadow today are Los Angeles Dodgers’ Mookie Betts and Cleveland Guardians’ José Ramírez, who have good power and low career strikeout percentages. However, both are now 32 years old —presumably past their prime — and their respective career OPS marks of .897 and .856 are lower than Pujols’ worst single-season OPS from 2001 to 2011. Neither has had a 40-home run season, a mark that Pujols hit six times in those 11 years.
As strikeouts have become so much more common in baseball, there are only a handful of hitters remaining with elite power and plate discipline; within those that remain, none are either as powerful or as disciplined as Pujols. Slugging and avoiding strikeouts are almost mutually exclusive in today’s game.
Among the players who have come after him, Pujols has no equal. He was the pinnacle of pure hitting, and because of the changing dynamics of baseball, we’ll probably never see a hitter like him again.
