Albert Pujols Upset with Wife's Brain Surgery Outcome

The MLB slugger files for divorce days after the successful procedure

Last week Diedre Pujols had successful surgery to remove a tumor that had been growing in her brain. She didn’t know if she would survive and posted to Instagram asking people pray for her. The operation was a success.

The following Monday her husband of twenty-two years and mother to his five children, MLB great Albert Pujols, announced he was filing for divorce.

Albert Pujols elected not to travel from Florida, where the Cardinals are conducting spring training, to California, where his then wife was having the procedure, but he did make sure to check his text messages during an exhibition game, which is how he found out the good news.

He then had his agent issue a statement.

I have made the decision to file for divorce from my wife, Deidre. I realize this is not the most opportune time with Opening Day approaching and other family events that have recently taken place.

He’s right. This may not have been the most opportune time. It would appear to be almost the least opportune time. It seems incredibly callous.

There are a few things to pick apart here. The phrasing of “Opening Day… and other family events,” leads one to conclude that Pujols considers the first Cardinals game of the season to be a “family event.”

The baseball game he’s referring to would take place three days from when he released this statement, although Diedre’s operation happened roughly six days prior, so it seems as though he would have had more than ample time to attend both of his family events - the baseball game and his wife’s brain surgery.

It follows that Albert Pujols considers his Cardinals teammates to be family - and this is the type of leader a Cardinals fan would want in the clubhouse.

It seems obvious to me, as someone who watches a lot of murder documentaries, that Albert Pujols was waiting to see if his wife was going to die before he filed for divorce.

He’s made $360,000,000 in salary, plus Nike and other endorsements, during his twenty-two season career. They married young. He does not have a prenuptial agreement. If the operation had been unsuccessful he’d owe her nothing. As of now it’s going to be half.

That’s pretty sick and all, but as a baseball fan I like where his head is at. It appears that Albert Pujols values his baseball family over his nuclear family, and I don’t like to stereotype but frankly Latin American players can get a little too attached to their families and it can affect their play as well as team morale since guys in the clubhouse get sick of their yammering on about their kids.

There are plenty of players who talk the talk. We’ve all heard it. Kobe Bryant. Michael Jordan. Tom Brady. Winning is everything. I care about one thing: Winning. Nothing else matters. I’ll do whatever it takes.

Yet how many of those players would forgo a completely pointless spring training exhibition game to be there for their other family while a brain tumor was being removed?

That’s not how you win, and frankly I’ve never seen an athlete completely dedicate themselves to winning like this.

If winning was really all you cared about, and you’d actually do whatever it takes, and you weren’t just a dork spitting out trite cliches, there are a few things you would do - if you actually meant the things you say.

First you would collect the minimum salary so that you could have better players on your team, giving you a better chance of winning.

Then you would probably want to hire an Israeli surveillance outfit to begin a targeted harassment campaign against the best players on opposing teams and really escalate this activity prior to big games.

This could include hiring actors to portray serial killers and place threatening phone calls to their families, leaving severed horse heads near their front doors, and potentially even sabotaging the team plane. Perhaps you’d want to have the starting pitcher assassinated.

It would depend on how far you’d want to take it. It would depend on how much you care about winning, at any cost.

All jokes aside there’s not a lot of nuance here. Albert Pujols is a terrible human being who was hoping his wife of over twenty years and the mother of his children would die so he could save some money, and didn’t even have the decency to appear to be a person of any character.

I’m hoping he gets booed every time he steps up to the plate or that a high fastball punches his lights out for good. I hear he also sucks at baseball now too so maybe he won’t get off the hook as easily.