Albert Pujols has managed to end his home run drought in Los Angeles, but the numbers are still far from cutting it. A quarter of the way through the season, the $240 million man is still hitting .214 with an on-base percentage of only .248. He has driven in only 18 runs and has three homers, but Pujols is finally showing signs of life at the plate. As someone who knows plenty about starting the year off in a horrible slump, David Ortiz says he is not worried about Albert turning it around — and we shouldn’t be either.
“Albert Pujols? Let me tell you something about Albert Pujols,” Ortiz said according to ESPNBoston.com. “Albert Pujols is a bad mother f—er. The baseball world needs Albert Pujols.
“I spent two months with one home run, and I got exhausted mentally and physically. But it was more mental because it was too much of me trying different things and trying to figure out why I wasn’t hitting homers.”
Since joining the Red Sox, Ortiz has always seemed to start incredibly slow. Despite crawling out of the gate, his power numbers are always among the best in the American League when the season concludes. At this point, we have no reason to expect the same won’t be true for Pujols.
“One day I just thought, ‘Wait a minute,” Ortiz continued. “‘When I used to play little league, there was nobody telling me what to do, so let me go back to those days. I’m going to the field with a fresh mind and watch no video, no nothing, and I’m not going to listen to nobody. I’m just going to go see the ball and hit it.’ That was it. That’s all it takes. That’s all it took me.”
Maybe Albert needs to channel his inner 11-year-old and everything will fall into place. What we do know is that Ortiz is right about it being mental. With how good of a player Pujols is, there’s no way he would be hitting this poorly if he wasn’t thinking too much. As soon as he starts seeing the ball and reacting, he’ll go on a tear. The problem is that sometimes the longer it lasts the harder it is to snap out of it.
