After hitting a home run in yesterday’s win, Albert Pujols has 11 home runs and only nine strikeouts on the 2009 season. Homering more than striking out is one of those feats that is an unheralded — perhaps owing to the fact that it’s so seldom done — but telltale sign of greatness in a hitter. After all, it’s a measure of how often a player accomplishes the best batting outcome over against how often he utterly fails. Having more home runs than strikeouts (min. 30 home runs) has occurred fewer times than hitting for the cycle, hitting 50 home runs in a season and getting six hits in a game. Seventeen of the 26 seasons in which is has happened belong to Hall of Famers. And it hasn’t been done by a player not on steroids since 1956.

All that is to say that, for all of his feats, Pujols has yet to accomplish perhaps his most monumental. Twenty-eight games into the season, Pujols still has a long way to go to join the following legendary seasons in which a player has hit as many home runs as times he struck out (min. 30 home runs):

Phat likely won’t beat the Yankee Clipper’s 2.31 ratio of home runs to strikeouts, which may be the most unreachable record in baseball these days. Still, to even make it on the list in this free-swinging era is laudable. After all, even if Pujols is something less than all-natural, PEDs don’t do much for you if you don’t make contact. Will Pujols join fellow Cardinals Stan Musial and Rogers Hornsby this year? It’s a feat worth following.

This entry was posted by Pip on Thursday, May 7th, 2009 at 8:48 pm and is filed under by the numbers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.