Baseball players are often accused of presenting themselves as younger than they actually are. But it is becoming harder to slip under teams’ radars
No matter how full the stadiums may be, normalcy will still be in short supply when the new Major League Baseball season opens under the shadow of the pandemic. “Face mask enforcement officers” will patrol clubhouses to ensure compliance, players will sport electronic contact tracing devices and the specter of an outbreak will loom over every road trip.
All of which made the recent headlines surrounding Albert Pujols feel a bit like a return to the before times. The Los Angeles Angels slugger, entering what could be the final campaign of his illustrious career, found himself staring down questions about his age after a former MLB executive asserted that Pujols isn’t really 41. Officially, Pujols was born in 1980, but according to former Miami Marlins president David Samson, “not one person in baseball” actually believes that. The comments evoked memories of a not-long-ago era in baseball, when age falsification was a recurring storyline in the game. “I believe – we all believe, in baseball – that he was one of scores of players who falsified their age in order to better their ability to join Major League Baseball with the highest signing bonus possible,” Samson told the Guardian last week.
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