It happened, and I'm still not sure why: Albert Pujols signed a 10-year, $254 million deal with the Los Angeles Angels (of Anaheim) (near Los Angeles), ending his 11-year tenure with the St. Louis Cardinals on one of those awkward notes where everything he said—about loving St. Louis, about money, about competitive teams—suddenly felt like a series of stabs in the back.
That'll go away eventually—the moral of this story is just that players who aren't willing to leave millions of dollars off the table once they become marginally less important to living the rest of your life without worrying about money should not hope to talk about how much they want to be Cardinal for life—But that's the story of this moment: Pujols's love of St. Louis was worth, apparently, about $4 million a year.
Not that the Cardinals are without blame: The Cardinals decided that saving $4 million a year, ending their contract talks at 10 years, $210 million rather than 10 years, $254 million, was worth dropping all the pomp and ceremony of the second half of Pujols's career—the record chases, the best-Cardinal-ever revelry, all of that, valued, finally, at about what the Cardinals paid Ryan Theriot last year.
The Cardinals will be all of one player different next year as a direct result of this deal, but they'll be unrecognizable—these are now, surprisingly enough, Adam Wainwright's Cardinals, Matt Holliday's. Eventually that team will be the Cardinals we recognize and the ones we root for. For now, though, it's fair to be disappointed—at Albert Pujols, at the St. Louis Cardinals, at saying things you don't immediately realize you can't mean.
