Albert Pujols named Player of the Year
TOWER GROVE — St. Louis Cardinals first baseman Albert Pujols continued gathering momentum toward the ultimate prize of baseball’s award season Friday as the Major League Baseball Players Association and its members named Pujols their Player of the Year.
Pujols edged LA Dodgers outfielder Manny Ramirez and Cleveland pitcher Cliff Lee for the award, which is based on a vote of his peers, fellow members of the players’ union. The award punctuates a week of accolades for the Cardinals’ first baseman and leading candidate for the NL MVP. Earlier, Pujols was honored with the Players Choice Award for NL Outstanding Player and Sporting News selected him as its Player of the Year. Both honors were based on votes of players.
From this morning’s MLBPA release:
Pujols dominated opposing pitching this season and finished second in the NL batting race with a .357 average while hitting 37 home runs and driving in 116 runs. His 104 walks, .462 OBP and 1.115 OPS (on-base plus slugging percentage) were all career-highs. He also became the only Major League player to hit at least 30 home runs and 100 RBIs in each of his first eight seasons. Pujols, 28, earlier in the week captured the National League Outstanding Player award and has now won a total of six Players Choice Awards since entering the league in 2001.
Pujols’ six Players Choice awards put him third all-time behind Alex Rodriguez’s eight and Barry Bonds’ seven.
An interview with Pujols about today’s award is available at Yahoo! Sports.
The Players Choice Player of the Year award has been a more-reliable indicator of the MVP award than the other trophies Pujols has taken this week. Each of the previous two winners of the Players Choice Player of the Year award have also won their league’s MVP — Rodriguez in the American League last season and Ryan Howard in the National League back in 2006. Four times since 2001 the winner of the Player of the Year award has also won his league’s MVP, including Bonds twice.
The winner of the National League MVP, an award based on the vote of 32 members of the BBWAA, will be announced Nov. 17. It is being handicapped as a two-bat race, between Pujols and Howard.
Voting was conducted before the start of the playoffs.
Pujols was also a finalist for this year’s Marvin Miller Man of the Year Award, what would have been the second time in his career that he won the award for service off the field as well as performance on it. That award, according to the release from MLBPA, went to Texas shortstop Michael Young.
Pujols will receive $50,000 for the Player of the Year award and $20,000 from the NL Outstanding Player award to be given to a charity of his choice.
-30-
Derrick Goold said he was going to Mizzou for capital-J journalism, but after growing up in the Time Zone Baseball Forgot he was really drawn to MU sitting between two major-league cities. Goold joined the Post-Dispatch in 2001 after working for The Times-Picayune and Rocky Mountain News, covering sports from LSU to NHL and every level of baseball in between. 
Congratulations, Albert! Let’s just hope that the baseball writers get it right this year, and vote you as MVP. This award probably means more than the MVP, though, because it’s voted on by his peers.