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Mickey Mantle was a baseball great, one of the best ever. He now has fewer homers than Albert Pujols, however, as the Angels slugger passed him on the all-time home run list with No. 537 on Thursday night. Next up is the top-15 of all-time, and another MLB Hall of Famer, Mike Schmidt, is just 11 homers away.
Pujols is having himself a fine season, so getting all 11 of them before the 2015 season is over is realistic. While Pujols had just three homers in April, he’s slugging .625 with another 14 since May began, and is now tied for fourth in the majors in long balls. He can’t keep it up forever, of course, but he also doesn’t have to in order to make some history: in front of Schmidt are Manny Ramirez, Reggie Jackson, Rafael Palmeiro, Harmon Killebrew and Mark McGwire, with McGwire the current gatekeeper for the top-10 all-time, with 583. Pujols very likely has the 47 home runs needed to pass McGwire still in him, even if he doesn’t keep on mashing like this for a few more years yet.
Of course, Pujols being under contract through 2021 -- a season in which he’ll make $30 million at age 41 -- also helps his ability to make it into the top-10, whether he bashes or limps his way in. Who knows how long the Angels will keep giving him chances to play -- getting paid doesn’t guarantee you’ll be used, you know -- but it won’t be hard to write his name into the lineup so long as he’s outhomering Mike Trout.
- The Nationals’ presidents met the actual president, and he challenged them to a race.
- The Rangers need to draw up a new game plan, where hitting baseballs anywhere near Billy Burns is not advised.
- MLB Network will now stream all of its programming and games, so Major League Baseball is now the first of the league-owned networks to be fully available online.
- Matt Kemp was tackled by an umpire, which is wrong on a whole lot of levels.
- The league has about six weeks to sort this out, but as of right now, the list of sellers is a whole lot shorter than the list of buyers.
- Jedd Gyorko was demoted to Triple-A by the Padres. Jedd Gyorko is still owed $27 million after this season, thanks to a massive pre-arbitration contract. What went wrong? Gyorko is flat-out awful when he falls behind in the count, and once pitchers realized this was the case, all that promise from his minor-league career and rookie season vanished in a puff of 0-1 counts. If he’s to return to the majors and be anything close to being worth the rest of his contract, he’ll need to adjust and take that strategy out of their hands.
- Matt Joyce was quietly productive on the Rays for years, but just hasn’t been able to get it going with the Angels.
- Dallas Keuchel is an ace, even if he’s not the kind you’d normally think of.
- Will Leitch, like many of us, just wants the most entertaining players to be in the MLB All-Star Game.
- Now that the 2015 MLB Draft is over, we can start focusing on the 2016 MLB Draft!
- Or, you know, we could review the one that just happened, division-by-division. 2016 can wait.
- Andrew Benintendi, the seventh-overall pick and soon-to-be Red Sox prospect, was named Baseball America’s College Player of the Year for his breakout season at Arkansas.
- He’s not the only Sox draft pick in the news, as it turns out that Boston drafted Clate Schmidt out of Clemson shortly after his first chemotherapy session. You got this, Clate.
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