Albert Pujols: 703 Home Runs and the Machine Years

By 4Baseball Staff · November 5, 2026 · 9 min read

Albert Pujols retired with 703 home runs, 3,384 hits and 2,218 RBI. This profile splits his 22 seasons into the Cardinals years, the Angels years and the farewell, using the Lahman numbers.

Albert Pujols finished his career with 703 home runs, 3,384 hits, 686 doubles and 2,218 runs batted in. In the Lahman database that puts him fourth all-time in home runs behind Barry Bonds, Hank Aaron and Babe Ruth, second in RBI behind only Aaron, fifth in doubles and tenth in hits. A career that ranks that high in four categories would be remarkable if it had unfolded at an even pace. Pujols's did not. It came in two parts, and the gap between them is the most useful thing to understand about him.

In his first 11 seasons, with the St. Louis Cardinals from 2001 through 2011, he hit .328 with 445 home runs and 1,329 RBI. In his last 11, with the Angels, a brief stop with the Dodgers and a final year back in St. Louis, he hit .257 with 258 home runs and 889 RBI. Both halves are good by the standards of ordinary players. The first half is one of the great stretches in the history of the sport. The sections below follow the career in phases and explain what the statistics did and did not say.

From Santo Domingo to the Cardinals

Pujols was born on January 16, 1980, in Santo Domingo, in the Dominican Republic. The Lahman record lists him at 6 feet 3 inches and 235 pounds, throwing and batting right-handed. He came to the United States as a teenager and, in the Lahman college table, has a single stop at Maple Woods, a junior college in Missouri. He was drafted late, in the 13th round in 1999, and spent barely a season in the minors before the Cardinals put him on the opening-day roster in 2001. His major-league debut came on April 2, 2001.

What happened next surprised the people who had drafted him. In 2001 he played 161 games, hit .329 with 37 home runs and 130 RBI, and won the National League Rookie of the Year Award. He was selected for the All-Star team as a rookie. Those totals are the standard for a first season: a rookie who reaches 130 RBI is a rare thing, and the 37 home runs were the first of 14 seasons with at least 30. He played several positions that first year, including third base and the outfield, before the club settled him at first base.

Rookie of the Year was only the first of the awards. The Lahman award list for his career includes the Players Choice Outstanding Rookie in 2001, six Silver Slugger awards (2001, 2003, 2004, 2008, 2009 and 2010), two Gold Gloves (2006 and 2010), three Most Valuable Player awards (2005, 2008 and 2009) and the Roberto Clemente Award in 2008, which honors a player's work off the field as well as on it. He was named to 11 All-Star teams.

The Cardinals peak, 2001 to 2010

The first ten seasons, 2001 through 2010, are the part of the career that deserves the word "machine," the nickname that stuck to him. Across those ten years he hit .331 with 408 home runs and 1,230 RBI in 1,558 games. He drove in at least 100 runs in each of them, which is a streak few players have equaled, and then missed an eleventh straight by a single run when he drove in 99 in 2011.

The best single season for batting average is 2003, when he hit .359 with 212 hits, leading the National League in both categories in the Lahman leaders list. Todd Helton finished a point behind in average at .358. The best for power is 2006, with 49 home runs and 137 RBI, even though Ryan Howard of Philadelphia hit 58 and drove in 149 that year. In 2009 he led the league with 47 home runs, and in 2008 he hit .357 with 37 home runs.

What stands out is the steadiness. A hitter who bats over .310 with 30 or more home runs and 100 RBI every year for a decade is not riding a hot streak. Pujols also kept his strikeouts low relative to the era. Over his career he struck out 1,404 times and walked 1,373 times, a nearly even ratio in a period when league-wide strikeouts were rising. In 2001, the league averaged 6.67 strikeouts per team game; by 2011 it was 7.10, and by 2019 it was 8.81. A reader who wants to see how to read lines like these can check how to read a baseball box score.

October, 2004 to 2011

The Cardinals reached the World Series three times in the Pujols years, and the Lahman record gives the results: a loss in 2004, a win in 2006 and a win in 2011. In 2004 he was named most valuable player of the National League Championship Series. In the 2005 NLCS the Cardinals lost to Houston in six games, the series in which he hit a famous three-run home run off Brad Lidge in Game 5, a moment that sits in the club history of the Astros as well.

Over his whole career, Pujols appeared in 10 postseasons and hit .319 in 304 at-bats, with 97 hits, 19 home runs and 54 RBI in 88 games. The 2011 World Series against Texas gave him the postseason game people remember best: in Game 3, he hit three home runs in a single game, matching a mark held by only a few players in the history of the Series. The Cardinals won that title, the second of his career.

The 11th season, 2011, is the hinge. He batted .299 with 37 home runs, still strong, and his club won the championship. After the season, at 31, he became a free agent and signed a ten-year contract with the Los Angeles Angels. The Cardinals had been his only organization. The terms of the deal became a topic for years, but this guide does not carry salary figures because Lahman does not, and the central fact for the baseball record is the one the statistics show: from 2012 on, the player was not the same.

The Angels years, 2012 to 2021

The numbers are the easiest way to see the change. In 2012, his first Angels season, Pujols hit .285 with 30 home runs and 105 RBI in 154 games. In 2013 he played only 99 games and hit .258 with 17 home runs. In 2014 he was back with 159 games, 28 home runs, 105 RBI and a .272 average, and in 2015 he hit 40 home runs with a .244 average. In 2016 he drove in 119 runs and hit .268 with 31 home runs, and in 2017 he drove in 101, the last 100-RBI season of his career.

Then the decline accelerated. His batting average was .241 in 2017, .245 in 2018 and .244 in 2019. In 2020, a season shortened to 60 games, he hit .224 with 6 home runs in 39 games. He did reach milestones along the way: 500 home runs in 2014, 600 in 2017, and 3,000 hits in 2018. Those are real achievements and each is a significant and permanent line in the record book.

Between 2012 and 2016 he batted .266 with 146 home runs. Between 2017 and 2022 he batted .245 with 112. His rate of one home run per 19 or 20 at-bats was far from the one in 14 of the early years. That does not make the later years useless. A 40-home-run season in 2015 is a power season for anyone. It means that the all-around hitter who combined high average, power and patience had become a power hitter whose average and OBP were more ordinary. In his later years he was used increasingly as a designated hitter. The universal designated hitter, adopted in 2022, would later change how many veterans extend their careers, and anyone comparing him with David Ortiz, who built a Hall of Fame argument largely as a DH, will want to keep position in mind.

In 2021, the Angels released him, and he finished the year with the Dodgers; the Lahman line for that year is split between two clubs and shows .236 with 17 home runs in 109 games.

The farewell year and the 700 club

The ending turned out better than the middle. In 2022 Pujols returned to the Cardinals for a final season and hit .270 with 24 home runs and 68 RBI in 109 games. He won the Comeback Player of the Year Award, an honor the Lahman award list records for that year. In September he hit his 700th home run, becoming the fourth player to reach that mark after Bonds, Aaron and Ruth, and he finished with 703. The Lahman record lists his final regular-season game as October 4, 2022.

There is one oddity in the final line. In 2022 he also made a single appearance as a pitcher, one inning in which he allowed 3 hits and 4 earned runs, including 2 home runs. That produces an earned-run average of 36.00 in the career pitching line. It is a footnote, and it is the kind of footnote a long career produces.

The career totals set him next to other members of the elite clubs. His 3,384 hits are 10th in the Lahman list, behind Pete Rose, Ty Cobb, Hank Aaron, Stan Musial, Tris Speaker, Derek Jeter, Cap Anson, Honus Wagner and Carl Yastrzemski. His 686 doubles are fifth, behind Speaker, Rose, Musial and Cobb. His 2,218 RBI are second to Aaron's 2,297. Among his contemporaries, Alex Rodriguez finished with 696 home runs and 2,086 RBI, Craig Biggio with 3,060 hits, Jeff Bagwell with 449 home runs for Houston, and Ichiro Suzuki built his case on hits and speed.

What the statistics meant in his era

Pujols played through the end of the period of high scoring and into the period of the three true outcomes. In 2001, Lahman shows 4.78 runs and 1.12 home runs per team game. By 2011, the figures were 4.28 runs and 0.94 home runs. In 2019, a year of record home-run totals, they were 4.83 runs and 1.39 home runs. In 2022, his final season, they were 4.28 runs and 1.07 home runs, with 8.40 strikeouts per team game. A hitter's raw totals mean different things in each of those worlds, and that is why league-adjusted measures were created.

His early numbers came in a lower-scoring environment than the late 1990s, and that matters when judging them. A .331 average with 408 home runs over ten seasons stands out against league scoring of 4.78 runs per team game in 2001 and 4.61 in 2009. His late-career numbers came in an environment that rewarded home runs and strikeouts, and his lower average does not compare badly with that of other hitters of his age. A reader who wants to compute rates or compare seasons can use the site's stat calculator.

The era also has a context that anyone writing about the 2000s has to mention. The years of the late 1990s and early 2000s included well-documented steroid controversies, and readers sometimes ask about every power hitter of that period. Nothing in the Lahman data speaks to that question, and this article does not make claims about it. The record that is in the database is the record of production.

What Lahman cannot say

Lahman gives counting stats, rates, awards and teams. It has no wins above replacement, so it cannot put his first-base defense on the same scale as his hitting, even though the record shows two Gold Gloves. It has no Statcast data, so it cannot tell you how hard he hit the ball in 2003 or 2019. Its Negro Leagues rows cover 1920 to 1948, so the all-time lists used above include players from those leagues, and it cannot tell you how the game was played by the people it leaves out. For a better sense of what is missing, the site's data sources page describes the datasets behind these pages.

Hall of Fame voting is the other open question. Under the Hall's rules, a player appears on the Baseball Writers' ballot after a five-year wait from his last game, and the data in this article runs only through the 2025 season, so no vote has taken place. Whatever the result, the totals above are the argument: the combination of 703 home runs and 3,384 hits is a rare one, and the first ten years alone would have been a case.

Common questions

How many home runs did Albert Pujols hit? The Lahman database shows 703 in the regular season from 2001 through 2022, the fourth-highest total in the record behind Bonds (762), Aaron (755) and Ruth (714).

Which team did he play for? He played for the Cardinals from 2001 through 2011, the Angels from 2012 through 2021, the Dodgers briefly in 2021, and the Cardinals again in 2022.

How many MVP awards did he win? Three, in 2005, 2008 and 2009. He also won Rookie of the Year in 2001, Comeback Player of the Year in 2022, six Silver Sluggers and two Gold Gloves.

What was his best season? It depends on the measure. In 2003 he led the league with a .359 average and 212 hits. In 2006 he hit 49 home runs with 137 RBI. In 2009 he led the league with 47 home runs. Any of those years can be defended.

Did he really pitch? Yes, for one inning in 2022, as the Lahman pitching line shows, and the result was a 36.00 earned-run average.

Where to go next

To place Pujols among other great hitters of his time, read the profiles of Alex Rodriguez, David Ortiz and Ichiro Suzuki. The site's leaders pages let you sort the career lists yourself, and the star players topic page collects current reading on the sport's best hitters.