Albert Pujols, as of Monday morning, is hitting .143 and slugging .229. He's got as many double plays as hits—he's on pace to end up with 90 of each. It's been awful to watch Albert Pujols make a terrible offense even worse, but so far that's exactly what's happened.
But it's been 30 at-bats. If you're worried—well, it's impossible to not be worried. Watching Albert Pujols slump is like staring at a mirage where the laws of physics briefly seem to have stopped applying. You know things will resolve to normality in the end, but it's hard to convince yourself until that the upside-down castle disappears and your traveling companion stops looking like a thick, juicy steak. I can't convince you not to fret, because I'm fretting myself, but I've dug up some other awful Pujols slumps, and I'd be happy to show them to you.
I won't be able to find all those double plays, but I can definitely come up with some other stints that look a lot like 5-35 with one extra-base hit.
Going backward in time:
July 20-29 2010: 9 G, 6-37, 1 HR, .162/.256/.243. This is slightly better than his nine games so far—one more hit in two more at-bats—and he only grounded into one double-play, though he struck out twice more. July is a perfect time to slump for a week; you've got enough at-bats that thing don't look catastrophic by the end of it, and your numbers still have time to bounce back afterward.
May 7-16 2009: 8 G, 5-29, 2 HR, .172/.265/.379. It's almost impossible to find a slump in Pujols's 2009 season, which was nearly perfect; his OPS didn't fall below 1.039 once all year. After he went 1-4 on May 16 it sat at 1.087; he went 2-3 with a double the next day.
June 1-8 2008: 8 G, 3-21, 1 HR, .143/.333/.333. It's even harder to find a slump in 2008, but this is as close as it gets. Three of his five walks were intentional, so this might have been a little worse than it looks. On June 10, after a day off, he homered, and on June 26, after spending some time out of the lineup, he went 4-4. Slump over.
You might be wondering what such arbitrary selections—you have to pick around home runs and triples, three and five hit days, to find these slumps—can possibly tell us about a player like Albert Pujols. And you'd be right to wonder. The point, I guess, is that the beginning of the season tempts us to make the same arbitrary selections by having a concrete starting point. Is it likely that, at some point in the offseason, Albert Pujols totally lost it at 31 years old? Those big games are coming, they're just not here yet. And that brings us to one last slump:
April 1-14, 2007: 10 G, 6-38, 1 HR, .158/.256/.289. As it turned out, he wasn't done.
