165 Major League Baseball players became free agents at the end of the 2011 season, including 2011 World Series hero, Albert Pujols. For the first time in his MLB career, the 11-year veteran and arguably the best player currently in the league, was in limbo between teams. December 10, 2011, became every Cardinals fans’ worst nightmare and every Angels fans’ dream come true, as Pujols signed a 10-year / $254 million contract with the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. Sports expert and author of Playing America’s Game: Baseball, Latinos, and the Color Line, Dr. Adrian Burgos recently spoke with Pro Player Insiders to give the inside scoop on Pujols’ move!
According to Burgos, Cardinal fans shouldn’t be upset with the first baseman’s decision to leave, but rather with Cardinal management, which neglected to take care of the veteran All- Star. Burgos believes that management’s decision to overlook Pujols to cater to Matt Holliday, a player with no prior history with the Cardinals, was the deal breaker for Pujols.
“He saw that management was in a sort of sense, disrespecting him. He was the guy whose been in the organization since Day 1, whose a great citizen on Saint Louis, who…in the eyes of Saint Louis, was a good citizen ball player… without Albert, there’s no way the Cardinals will win a World Series. And they won a world series without Matt Holliday and basically last year they pretty much won it without Holliday too—because he was injured most of the post- season run. And they were a magical post season run last year, and that was because they had Albert Pujols,” says Burgos.
Burgos, who also authored, Cuban Star: How One Negro – League Owner Changed the Face of Baseball, suggests that if Albert Pujols, who is Dominican, were of Caucasian decent, then his situation regarding Cardinals management refusing to pay him what he deserved, would have not even occurred. Here’s why:
“As I wrote in Playing America’s Game, these Latino players, at a certain level, can not escape the Latino element of how people perceive them. Fans wanted Albert to give the Cardinals another hometown discount, for him to express the ultimate loyalty to the team and its owners, versus to his family, to himself, and the all- mighty free market capitalist system that runs baseball. They want[ed] him to act differently — how many people were upset in Oakland, and prior to that when Matt Holliday in Colorado, because he basically forced the Rockies and the A’s hand, and ultimately went for the big dollars? Holliday had nothing that the Saint Louis Cardinals owed him, and they opened the bank for a player who’s a ‘good to great’ hitter and horrid outfielder. Pujols, because he’s Latino, and it’s the story of ‘pulling himself up by the bootstraps’, people fell in love with the entire narrative. They want[ed] him to be the old –time, loyal player like a [Stan] Musial, but Musial didn’t have time to leave—that’s not the way the system was structured in baseball back then.”
In contrast to his feelings towards decisions made my Cardinals management, expert, Adian Burgos feels that Angels owner (and only Hispanic MLB owner), Arte Moreneo’s decision to make Pujols the highest paid first baseman in the league, was very appropriate and a smart move for the Angels! Burgos says:
“Arte Moreno made his millions and perhaps even billions of dollars in advertising. This is a typical Arte Moreno move—this is a way that Arte thinks he can use Albert’s prominence as a ball player to reach into Latin America, to reach into the US Latino market, and recuperate all the money he’s going to be paying Albert! Why not go to the very best first baseman we’ve seen in the last 50 years?!”
