Angels 1B Albert Pujols hits 500th career home run

There are two different kinds of reactions to 500 home runs. Here, a chart!

Thank you, octopus with a bow tie. I’m on the side of 500 is Interesting, obviously. Look at the danged names in the 500 Home Run Club. Mays. Mantle. Ruth. Schmidt. All of them a part of baseball’s rich tapestry. All of them benefactors of the dinger arts.

In his younger days, Pujols shrugged off the pain in his foot daily, and put up numbers that earned him a spot next to the game’s immortals while doing it. From 2001 through 2011 (ages 21 through 31) Pujols compiled a 170 OPS+, the seventh-best ever minimum 7,000 plate appearances. Pujols’ name was sandwiched between Hall of Famers Mickey Mantle and Ty Cobb, and he was well ahead of the pace that history’s greatest Cardinal, Stan Musial, had set in his own tremendous career.

It’s harder to ignore pain as a player ages, though, and Pujols’ foot could no longer take the incessant march towards his mid-30s. A tear in his plantar fascia gave the 33-year-old’s foot the opportunity to recover in much the same way surgery would have repaired a problem that had literally nipped at his heels since 2004. The 2014 season promised a fresh start for one of the game’s great hitters, a first baseman who even as he exited his peak years could still put a charge into a pitch when he was feeling right.

First, a pair of baseball writers provided interesting nuggets of information surrounding the milestone blast:

A few current and former players, including an ex-teammate of Pujols’ chimed in as well:

Does that discussion take place around the Angels? And if so, how do you define what a “True Angel” is? Again, there are no rules for what is a wholly amorphous, tribal-throwback of an idea, but I imagine that a player earns his Truthfulness (Trueness? Truism? Truthiness? No, that meant something else.) through some combination of long service, great accomplishments with the club, both on an individual and team level, and a winning personality (this is where A-Rod’s candidacy started to go off the rails, even before Biogenesis). I bet it doesn’t hurt to have been a homegrown player either -- nothing like watching a kid build his Hall of Fame case from the ground up.

I realize Doug Decinces was an MVP candidate in 1982 and played on two postseason teams in Anaheim, but how invested can you get in six years and 787 games? Who has more joy in Pujols hitting his 500^th home run? (A) The disgruntled Cardinals fan, annoyed with either the organization or the player for leaving? (B) The Angels fan who has hardly gotten to know the guy but does have the dread of the coming years hanging over him like gigantic grey bewhiskered spider of aging, or (C) There is no correct answer; both are alike in their relative indifference?