The St. Louis Cardinals are 37 games into the 2006 season and Albert Pujols has an unheard of 19 home runs to lead the major leagues.    He also leads the majors in RBIs with 47 and has a NL leading .341 batting average.

On Saturday, Pujols became the fastest player in major league history to belt 19 homeruns.  He claims, “I’m not a home run hitter, McGwire’s a home run hitter, Bonds is a home run hitter.

He explains; “I’m a line drive hitter with power, and that’s it. All I try to do is just hit for average, and hopefully if I put a good swing on it the ball’s going to go out of the park.”

But Pujols has surpassed Mickey Mantle’s pace of 1956 and Luis Gonzalez’ pace of 2001 by 3 games in reaching the 19 homer plateau.  Mantle had 52 homers in 1956 and Gonzalez 57 in his unexpected monster year for the Arizona Diamondbacks in  2001. 

With Pujol’s 19th homer yesterday, he eclipsed a pace set by Cy Williams of the 1923 Philadelphia Phillies who hit 18 homers in his first 34 games and then slowed down markably and ended the year with a total of 41 homers in just 136 games.

Pujols’ pace projected over 162 games this year works out to … are you ready for this? … 83 homeruns.    Move over, Barry??

Add to:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. | del.icio.us | digg | Furl | Reddit | YahooMyWeb |

« Red Hot Phillies Impacting on Two NL Divisional Races … «

» Inter-League Play Begins: Rivalries Heating to a Boil Between NL East, AL East Over the Next 10 Days … »

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 14th, 2006 at 1:47 pm and is filed under All Time Baseball Highlights
Real-Time Baseball News and Commentary
All Time Hitting Highlights. 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.