Former RiverDogs Manager Torre Tyson Mentioned
This article appears in the
March 8 issue of ESPN The Magazine.
Everyone asks the man a simple question: Why are you so serious?
The curiosity is legitimate. He exudes sobriety and responsibility, from his penetrating eyes to the facial hair that's groomed like a country-club green. He carries himself with the bearing of an ambassador, upright and stoic and very nearly regal. He emanates gravity.
So back to the question: Why?
Albert Pujols can't begin to explain it; couldn't even if he were big on words, which he assuredly is not. And so he keeps the answer on professional terms, discussing his job and his responsibilities to his teammates and the vast sum of money he is paid by the owners of the St. Louis Cardinals to play first base and drive in runs. Everything we might consider to be an enemy of seriousness -- playing baseball for a living, being great at it, acquiring torrents of wealth in the process -- is the very reason he gives for being as lighthearted as a fallen oak. "You don't mess around on your job," he says. "I'm getting paid a lot of money to play this game, and I know that people are expecting a lot from me. If you're sitting in an office and you're in control of 200 employees and you don't set an example for those employees, do you think they're going to respect you? No."
He is the most feared hitter in baseball, a man whose offensive output is measured not by his peers but by history. His metronomic consistency makes the statistics over his nine-year career look like the product of an unimaginative accountant: home runs between 32 and 49, RBIs between 103 and 137, batting average between .314 and .359. His worst year was 2007, when he hit .327 with 32 homers, 103 RBIs. Repeated annually over the course of a long career, those numbers -- from the season in which he accomplished the least -- would make Pujols a first-ballot Hall of Famer.
His refrigerator-hum efficiency makes it difficult to remember that he came out of nowhere, a 13th-round pick in 1999 (a slight he will never forget) who spent one year in the minors before sprouting in St. Louis fully formed as a rookie in 2001. In fantasy terms, Pujols is the Last Great Sleeper. His arrival was the moment before dawn, when prospects could still glide in on rumor and word of mouth, without the lengthy and expectant preface of the NBA and NFL. But now baseball has caught up; the loud and stat-heavy machine of public pronouncement has done away with the Pujols-like revelations, replacing them with the insistent touting of prestars like Matt Wieters and Stephen Strasburg. Information and interest have all but legislated surprise out of the equation.
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of his consistency can be found in the swirl of fear that the 6'3", 230-pound Pujols engenders in opposing pitchers when he steps into the batter's box with his trademark scowl. "If you make a mistake by, like, six inches, he'll crush it," says Padres All-Star closer Heath Bell. "So my approach is, Don't let him beat me." Pujols' walk totals have increased nearly every year, reaching 115 in 2009, and he enters each game knowing he'll get only a limited number of quality pitches -- either by mistake or necessity. This is true regardless of who bats behind him. There is no batter -- not even Matt Holliday, owner of a new seven-year Cardinals contract to be Pujols' main protector -- a pitcher fears more than Albert. Said Holliday last September, "I would anticipate Albert's being walked if Babe Ruth were hitting behind him."
When it is suggested that he might get two or three of those mistake/necessity pitches over the course of every four or five at-bats, Pujols says, "That many? Oh, I would love that." (What happens when pitchers are left with no choice but to pitch to Pujols? With the bases loaded in 2009, he was 10-for-17 with five homers and 35 RBIs.)
This paucity of opportunity explains in part why Pujols is as serious as he is. And he is perfectly serious, at least in theory. Pujols factors in the variables -- pitcher, situation, likelihood of being challenged -- and practices for perfection. "Is it possible to have success 10 out of 10 times?" he says. "No, but I train for 10-for-10. I train for perfection."
Take a rare glimpse behind the curtain, inside a batting cage near Pujols' home outside St. Louis. Early on a January morning, he arrives with a quarter-size blister on his right hand, yet he pulls on a batting glove and begins hitting. After a few swings, his batting practice pitcher, Yankees Class-A manager Torre Tyson, who lives near St. Louis and whose father, Mike, played for the Cardinals, notices blood seeping through the glove. Pujols takes it off, wraps the hand in athletic tape and pulls on a new glove. Within a few swings, there is more blood.
It is not Tyson's job to offer opinions. His instructions are to throw the ball hard, down the middle, for as many swings as Pujols needs. He feeds Albert roughly 125 pitches every morning but Sunday. Tyson has been doing this for three winters, since he and Pujols met at the public facility, and the two have developed an easy familiarity. So after two blood-soaked batting gloves and a roll of athletic tape, Tyson speaks up. "Albert, you know you don't have to keep hitting," he says. "We can stop now."
Pujols fixes him with one of his more serious stares and replies, "You know what I'm going to say, don't you?" Tyson knows. It's the same thing Pujols says every time a teammate or Tyson suffers a minor injury or faces some other bit of unpleasantness. He says it when Tyson shows up at 7 in the morning and says his arm is hanging like a snapped branch, and he says it this time: "Would you play if it were the seventh game of the World Series?"
"But, Albert," Tyson continues, stretching the limits of his job description, "it's a Monday in January. It's not the seventh game of the World Series."
In response, Pujols pulls off the bloody batting glove and the bloody tape. He rewraps the hand, puts on another glove and gets back into the cage. Tyson shrugs and goes back to throwing, hard and down the middle.
The burden of responsibility sits heavily on Pujols. He turned 30 in January, but he was always old before his time. Growing up in the Dominican Republic -- he moved to Missouri with his father, Bienvenido, at age 16 -- part of his responsibility as an only child was to pick his dad up off the streets of Santo Domingo after a long night of drinking and carry him home. It's safe to say levity was not the hallmark of his childhood.
He met Dee Dee Corona when he was 18, and she was the single mother of Isabella, who has Down syndrome. Albert fell in love with both. He and Dee Dee married when Albert was 19, and they now have four children, the youngest born in February.
Why are you so serious? He answers the question by talking about his job and his teammates and his employer. He is a three-time MVP, and the effort required to become and remain the best in the game is serious business. That answer, the baseball-only answer, manages to be true but not wholly true, because it bypasses what roils inside him: the drive to reconcile his wondrous fortune in the face of the injustice around him. Next to that, a blister is nothing more than a minor irritant.
But it is easier to talk in baseball terms. That way, he does not have to delve into topics that might be less easily understood, like his commitment to the poorest of the poor in his homeland or his eagerness to bring joy to those who reside on society's margins. Or the dead baby.
She arrived wrapped in a blanket in the arms of her father, on a dirt road in a squalid neighborhood in Batey Aleman in the Dominican Republic early in 2007. (Bateys are shantytowns near sugar fields where laborers live.) The mother was a few steps behind, and her heartbreaking cries announced their arrival. They had just visited a witch doctor a few blocks up the street. Drums were pounded and flower petals sprinkled over the little girl's limp body. They left and took to the streets, looking for help. They found Dee Dee and Todd Perry and a camera crew on a humanitarian mission from the Pujols Family Foundation.
Perry, executive director/CEO of the foundation, pulled the blanket aside and looked in horror. He called for a doctor from a nearby clinic, who performed CPR already knowing the awful truth. He estimated the baby had been dead for 20 minutes. A waterborne virus caused uncontrolled diarrhea, which led to dehydration, then death. "A bottle of Gatorade," Albert says quietly. "A bottle of Gatorade would have saved her."
Albert wasn't there. He was at an impromptu dental clinic in the village with dentists he brought over from the States. But the baby is part of him too, in the same way the paralyzed woman who cried and hugged him when he carried a bed into her home in the batey is part of him. Injured in an accident in the sugarcane fields, she had been sleeping on a wet, moldy mat before Pujols arrived carrying a mattress atop his head as part of his Project Sound Asleep. She held Pujols and said, "Nobody has ever given me anything new."
A bed. How can a man enjoy his millions, how can he be lighthearted and jovial, how can he not be serious, when a dry, clean bed can bring a woman to tears? How can he ignore the injustice when he possesses the means to help? "I have been given a responsibility," Pujols says. "There is so much need."
The people of the bateys are the poorest of a poor country. Mostly Haitian, brought there to work in the cane fields, they live in unimaginable deprivation: no indoor plumbing, no running water, substandard nutrition, very little in the way of medical care or the knowledge of how to use it. Pujols makes at least one trip a year to the bateys. He has brought dentists and eye doctors, the latter providing exams and glasses to children who all along thought everyone sees the same blurry shapes when they open a book. (After the earthquake devastated Haiti in January, his foundation worked with Compassion International to raise money for relief.)
Aid to the D.R. is only half the story for Pujols' foundation. He also devotes considerable resources to serving kids and adults with Down syndrome. "There's one thing people should know about Albert and Dee Dee," Perry says. "They are among the people -- the lice, the scabies. We've even seen leprosy. They are not the type of people who say, 'You guys take care of this, we'll be by the pool.' It's remarkable to see someone of his stature humble himself the way he does. I've never seen anyone who works this hard on and off the field."
The Cardinals were honored at the White House after winning the 2006 World Series. Pujols skipped it because it conflicted with a planned visit to Batey Aleman. Last year, his foundation won the Community Service and Humanitarian Needs Award from the St. Louis Sports Hall of Fame, but he missed the banquet because it conflicted with the opening of a wellness center for Down syndrome adults. Perry accepted for him and opened his speech by saying, "I hope the irony of this doesn't escape you. The reason he isn't here is that he's across town helping people with Down syndrome."
Every fall, the foundation hosts a prom for those age 16 and older with Down syndrome. There's a ballroom and a red carpet, and the foundation recruits volunteers to line the runway and cheer on the attendees. "Adults with Down syndrome never get a prom," he says. "This is their chance." Some of the couples walk the red carpet five or six times, soaking up the cheers. Pujols dances with each person, showing off his salsa moves.
Last year the prom was scheduled for two days after Pujols' Oct. 21 surgery to remove bone chips from his right elbow. Perry suggested he skip it rather than risk being bumped or grabbed by exuberant prom-goers. Pujols simply replied, "It's my favorite night of the year."
He doesn't like to draw attention to his good work. To publicize it is to cheapen it. He takes the camera crew to the D.R. to film documentary footage for fund-raising purposes. "I don't like to talk about it because that's not why I do it," he says.
Joe Mazzola, who has worked as a cameraman on foundation trips to the bateys, says, "Albert changed my life. I just saw how he lived, and it inspired me. I'm sure I'm not alone."
Why are you so serious?
There are baseball answers, which are easy, and other answers that are anything but. On the field, the results of the work are quantifiable, judged by numbers repetitive and remarkable. Off it, there are no relevant statistics, nothing solid to define progress. There is only the gravity of the moment and a man who wears his seriousness well.
Tim Keown is a senior writer for ESPN The Magazine.
Everyone asks the man a simple question: Why are you so serious?
The curiosity is legitimate. He exudes sobriety and responsibility, from his penetrating eyes to the facial hair that's groomed like a country-club green. He carries himself with the bearing of an ambassador, upright and stoic and very nearly regal. He emanates gravity.
So back to the question: Why?
Albert Pujols can't begin to explain it; couldn't even if he were big on words, which he assuredly is not. And so he keeps the answer on professional terms, discussing his job and his responsibilities to his teammates and the vast sum of money he is paid by the owners of the St. Louis Cardinals to play first base and drive in runs. Everything we might consider to be an enemy of seriousness -- playing baseball for a living, being great at it, acquiring torrents of wealth in the process -- is the very reason he gives for being as lighthearted as a fallen oak. "You don't mess around on your job," he says. "I'm getting paid a lot of money to play this game, and I know that people are expecting a lot from me. If you're sitting in an office and you're in control of 200 employees and you don't set an example for those employees, do you think they're going to respect you? No."
He is the most feared hitter in baseball, a man whose offensive output is measured not by his peers but by history. His metronomic consistency makes the statistics over his nine-year career look like the product of an unimaginative accountant: home runs between 32 and 49, RBIs between 103 and 137, batting average between .314 and .359. His worst year was 2007, when he hit .327 with 32 homers, 103 RBIs. Repeated annually over the course of a long career, those numbers -- from the season in which he accomplished the least -- would make Pujols a first-ballot Hall of Famer.
His refrigerator-hum efficiency makes it difficult to remember that he came out of nowhere, a 13th-round pick in 1999 (a slight he will never forget) who spent one year in the minors before sprouting in St. Louis fully formed as a rookie in 2001. In fantasy terms, Pujols is the Last Great Sleeper. His arrival was the moment before dawn, when prospects could still glide in on rumor and word of mouth, without the lengthy and expectant preface of the NBA and NFL. But now baseball has caught up; the loud and stat-heavy machine of public pronouncement has done away with the Pujols-like revelations, replacing them with the insistent touting of prestars like Matt Wieters and Stephen Strasburg. Information and interest have all but legislated surprise out of the equation.
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of his consistency can be found in the swirl of fear that the 6'3", 230-pound Pujols engenders in opposing pitchers when he steps into the batter's box with his trademark scowl. "If you make a mistake by, like, six inches, he'll crush it," says Padres All-Star closer Heath Bell. "So my approach is, Don't let him beat me." Pujols' walk totals have increased nearly every year, reaching 115 in 2009, and he enters each game knowing he'll get only a limited number of quality pitches -- either by mistake or necessity. This is true regardless of who bats behind him. There is no batter -- not even Matt Holliday, owner of a new seven-year Cardinals contract to be Pujols' main protector -- a pitcher fears more than Albert. Said Holliday last September, "I would anticipate Albert's being walked if Babe Ruth were hitting behind him."
When it is suggested that he might get two or three of those mistake/necessity pitches over the course of every four or five at-bats, Pujols says, "That many? Oh, I would love that." (What happens when pitchers are left with no choice but to pitch to Pujols? With the bases loaded in 2009, he was 10-for-17 with five homers and 35 RBIs.)
This paucity of opportunity explains in part why Pujols is as serious as he is. And he is perfectly serious, at least in theory. Pujols factors in the variables -- pitcher, situation, likelihood of being challenged -- and practices for perfection. "Is it possible to have success 10 out of 10 times?" he says. "No, but I train for 10-for-10. I train for perfection."
Take a rare glimpse behind the curtain, inside a batting cage near Pujols' home outside St. Louis. Early on a January morning, he arrives with a quarter-size blister on his right hand, yet he pulls on a batting glove and begins hitting. After a few swings, his batting practice pitcher, Yankees Class-A manager Torre Tyson, who lives near St. Louis and whose father, Mike, played for the Cardinals, notices blood seeping through the glove. Pujols takes it off, wraps the hand in athletic tape and pulls on a new glove. Within a few swings, there is more blood.
It is not Tyson's job to offer opinions. His instructions are to throw the ball hard, down the middle, for as many swings as Pujols needs. He feeds Albert roughly 125 pitches every morning but Sunday. Tyson has been doing this for three winters, since he and Pujols met at the public facility, and the two have developed an easy familiarity. So after two blood-soaked batting gloves and a roll of athletic tape, Tyson speaks up. "Albert, you know you don't have to keep hitting," he says. "We can stop now."
Pujols fixes him with one of his more serious stares and replies, "You know what I'm going to say, don't you?" Tyson knows. It's the same thing Pujols says every time a teammate or Tyson suffers a minor injury or faces some other bit of unpleasantness. He says it when Tyson shows up at 7 in the morning and says his arm is hanging like a snapped branch, and he says it this time: "Would you play if it were the seventh game of the World Series?"
"But, Albert," Tyson continues, stretching the limits of his job description, "it's a Monday in January. It's not the seventh game of the World Series."
In response, Pujols pulls off the bloody batting glove and the bloody tape. He rewraps the hand, puts on another glove and gets back into the cage. Tyson shrugs and goes back to throwing, hard and down the middle.
The burden of responsibility sits heavily on Pujols. He turned 30 in January, but he was always old before his time. Growing up in the Dominican Republic -- he moved to Missouri with his father, Bienvenido, at age 16 -- part of his responsibility as an only child was to pick his dad up off the streets of Santo Domingo after a long night of drinking and carry him home. It's safe to say levity was not the hallmark of his childhood.
He met Dee Dee Corona when he was 18, and she was the single mother of Isabella, who has Down syndrome. Albert fell in love with both. He and Dee Dee married when Albert was 19, and they now have four children, the youngest born in February.
Why are you so serious? He answers the question by talking about his job and his teammates and his employer. He is a three-time MVP, and the effort required to become and remain the best in the game is serious business. That answer, the baseball-only answer, manages to be true but not wholly true, because it bypasses what roils inside him: the drive to reconcile his wondrous fortune in the face of the injustice around him. Next to that, a blister is nothing more than a minor irritant.
But it is easier to talk in baseball terms. That way, he does not have to delve into topics that might be less easily understood, like his commitment to the poorest of the poor in his homeland or his eagerness to bring joy to those who reside on society's margins. Or the dead baby.
She arrived wrapped in a blanket in the arms of her father, on a dirt road in a squalid neighborhood in Batey Aleman in the Dominican Republic early in 2007. (Bateys are shantytowns near sugar fields where laborers live.) The mother was a few steps behind, and her heartbreaking cries announced their arrival. They had just visited a witch doctor a few blocks up the street. Drums were pounded and flower petals sprinkled over the little girl's limp body. They left and took to the streets, looking for help. They found Dee Dee and Todd Perry and a camera crew on a humanitarian mission from the Pujols Family Foundation.
Perry, executive director/CEO of the foundation, pulled the blanket aside and looked in horror. He called for a doctor from a nearby clinic, who performed CPR already knowing the awful truth. He estimated the baby had been dead for 20 minutes. A waterborne virus caused uncontrolled diarrhea, which led to dehydration, then death. "A bottle of Gatorade," Albert says quietly. "A bottle of Gatorade would have saved her."
Albert wasn't there. He was at an impromptu dental clinic in the village with dentists he brought over from the States. But the baby is part of him too, in the same way the paralyzed woman who cried and hugged him when he carried a bed into her home in the batey is part of him. Injured in an accident in the sugarcane fields, she had been sleeping on a wet, moldy mat before Pujols arrived carrying a mattress atop his head as part of his Project Sound Asleep. She held Pujols and said, "Nobody has ever given me anything new."
A bed. How can a man enjoy his millions, how can he be lighthearted and jovial, how can he not be serious, when a dry, clean bed can bring a woman to tears? How can he ignore the injustice when he possesses the means to help? "I have been given a responsibility," Pujols says. "There is so much need."
The people of the bateys are the poorest of a poor country. Mostly Haitian, brought there to work in the cane fields, they live in unimaginable deprivation: no indoor plumbing, no running water, substandard nutrition, very little in the way of medical care or the knowledge of how to use it. Pujols makes at least one trip a year to the bateys. He has brought dentists and eye doctors, the latter providing exams and glasses to children who all along thought everyone sees the same blurry shapes when they open a book. (After the earthquake devastated Haiti in January, his foundation worked with Compassion International to raise money for relief.)
Aid to the D.R. is only half the story for Pujols' foundation. He also devotes considerable resources to serving kids and adults with Down syndrome. "There's one thing people should know about Albert and Dee Dee," Perry says. "They are among the people -- the lice, the scabies. We've even seen leprosy. They are not the type of people who say, 'You guys take care of this, we'll be by the pool.' It's remarkable to see someone of his stature humble himself the way he does. I've never seen anyone who works this hard on and off the field."
The Cardinals were honored at the White House after winning the 2006 World Series. Pujols skipped it because it conflicted with a planned visit to Batey Aleman. Last year, his foundation won the Community Service and Humanitarian Needs Award from the St. Louis Sports Hall of Fame, but he missed the banquet because it conflicted with the opening of a wellness center for Down syndrome adults. Perry accepted for him and opened his speech by saying, "I hope the irony of this doesn't escape you. The reason he isn't here is that he's across town helping people with Down syndrome."
Every fall, the foundation hosts a prom for those age 16 and older with Down syndrome. There's a ballroom and a red carpet, and the foundation recruits volunteers to line the runway and cheer on the attendees. "Adults with Down syndrome never get a prom," he says. "This is their chance." Some of the couples walk the red carpet five or six times, soaking up the cheers. Pujols dances with each person, showing off his salsa moves.
Last year the prom was scheduled for two days after Pujols' Oct. 21 surgery to remove bone chips from his right elbow. Perry suggested he skip it rather than risk being bumped or grabbed by exuberant prom-goers. Pujols simply replied, "It's my favorite night of the year."
He doesn't like to draw attention to his good work. To publicize it is to cheapen it. He takes the camera crew to the D.R. to film documentary footage for fund-raising purposes. "I don't like to talk about it because that's not why I do it," he says.
Joe Mazzola, who has worked as a cameraman on foundation trips to the bateys, says, "Albert changed my life. I just saw how he lived, and it inspired me. I'm sure I'm not alone."
Why are you so serious?
There are baseball answers, which are easy, and other answers that are anything but. On the field, the results of the work are quantifiable, judged by numbers repetitive and remarkable. Off it, there are no relevant statistics, nothing solid to define progress. There is only the gravity of the moment and a man who wears his seriousness well.
Tim Keown is a senior writer for ESPN The Magazine.