They should be melancholy but ultimately relieved

I have MANY years of experience in trying to appreciate steaming piles of dogshit.

But I really do wish him the best...hopefully he is leading them to AL pennants every year...and nothing more.

Yes it is.

When this is all over, which is not going to be for a while, Trump will be re-elected President.

We change owners, we change leagues, yadda yadda yadda, we STILL end up having to compete with Pujols in our division!!

Hopefully we'll learn to, in the words of some great poster on the internets who wrote one time:

Pitch around Pujols, dumbass!!

I smell a bit....

Remember that if they play the Cubs in the WS.

The best player in baseball is gone, and now the people who run the Cardinals are singing a phony chorus of lament, regret and frustration because they keep telling anyone who'll listen, gosh darn it, they really, really, really, really wanted to keep Albert Pujols in St. Louis.

"I would like our fans to know that we tried our best to make Albert a lifetime Cardinal," team chairman Bill DeWitt Jr. said.

"I think we did everything we could," said general manager John Mozeliak.

Of course, I can't hear what they're saying because their actions have drowned out their words.

Their actions tell another story entirely. Their actions seem to suggest the Cards allowed a once-in-a-generation, three-time MVP, future Hall of Famer and franchise icon to slip away without much of a valiant or sincere fight.

Their actions seem to suggest that Pujols' departure to the Los Angeles Angels for a stunning, 10-year, $254 million contract was, as best as I can figure, the result of only three possible scenarios:

1. The Cardinals grossly underestimated how high his asking price might soar once Pujols reached free agency.

2. They arrogantly underestimated what sort of human touch would be required to successfully court a prideful man and the best hitter of his generation.

3. The Cardinals simply decided a long time ago that they never had any intention of re-signing Pujols and allowing him to retire as a local treasure, but opted for image purposes to put up a carefully constructed facade of a "negotiation" to mislead Cardinals fans into believing an earnest pursuit of Pujols was going on.

I am leaning hard toward No. 3. This entire episode feels too much like a long, dragged-out bogus courtship. Imagine DeWitt, using his best inside voice and whispering in a windstorm — "Hey Albert … come … back" — then shrugging his shoulders with a sheepish grin and telling us "I guess he didn't hear me."

Yeah, I guess not, because DeWitt and Mozeliak had so many chances to get Pujols' name on a new deal over the past two years, yet dragged their feet and allowed him to get away. They could have re-signed him two years ago before they re-signed Matt Holliday, but they decided instead to position themselves for his eventual departure.

They could have re-signed him two years ago when the asking price would have been more reasonable, before a series of unforeseen blockbuster free-agent deals for the likes of Ryan Howard, Joe Mauer, Carl Crawford, Mark Teixeira and Jayson Werth created a new dynamic in baseball's salary structure.

They could have re-signed him last January before the start of spring training, but put an inflexible bid on the table that wouldn't have even made him the third highest-paid first baseman in the game.

If the Cardinals had truly wanted to re-sign Pujols, they could have accomplished that goal at any point during the past two years. Instead, they quietly allowed the conversation to go out there that no one in their right mind would offer a 32-year-old slugger — one who had just accomplished arguably the most impressive first 11 seasons in modern baseball history — a 10-year deal.

Yet soon as he hit the free-agent market, a mad spending spree ensued and three teams did in fact put 10-year deals on the table.

Two years have gone by since the Cardinals were able to re-sign Holliday, and during all that time DeWitt and Mozeliak had ample opportunities to get Pujols' name on a contract and never did. Several baseball sources say that the Cardinals didn't even react to the probability of a surging marketplace. When they took a nine-year, $198 million deal off the table last week, they replaced it with a five-year, $130 million offer that ultimately escalated in agonizingly slow increments as the week went on.

Then along came the Angels, who did not enter the fray until Tuesday, but by Wednesday morning put their surprising deal on the table. Angels GM Jerry DiPoto said the team had been thinking about bidding on Pujols for a while, but as soon as owner Arte Moreno made up his mind that they were pursuing Pujols, they went all in, in a hurry. By Wednesday morning, Moreno and DiPoto delivered the monster $254 million deal to Pujols' agent Dan Lozano, then waited to hear back from Pujols.

The Angels were dead serious and completely aggressive as they could be. On Thursday, DiPoto said that once they delivered the proposed contract to Lozano, they went on a telephone blitz with the Pujols family, speaking extensively with Albert and his wife Dee Dee to express their interest in no uncertain terms.

The Cardinals, on the other hand, did not display such a winning personal touch. The Cardinal Way at the negotiating table, as I've said a hundred times before, is the cold and impersonal touch. Strictly business.

As team vice president Bill DeWitt III expressed it so eloquently, their approach was to keep working emotionlessly toward a deal "until it cuts to the bone. And when it cuts to bone, it's better to stop the surgery."

The Cardinals will carefully cry poor now, telling you that they cut to the bone. The truth is more like this: The more they kept cutting the meat of this deal, the more they realized that Pujols was not necessarily cutting to the bone, but more accurately, he was starting to cut into their part of the meat.

So now they want you to believe that everything will be all right, and maybe it will. That remains to be seen how much better life will be in Cardinal Nation without Pujols or Tony La Russa around. DeWitt III says Pujols' departure will allow the Cards to 'spread the wealth" on their payroll, which sort of made me chuckle when I heard that phrase coming out of his mouth (we pause this column for a moment for a little political irony).

In theory, I know what DeWitt was trying to say. In reality, I hope that their 'spread the wealth" plan doesn't end up being a misguided strategy where they end up collecting a bunch of interesting little baseball trinkets thinking that they'll be able to replace a Hope Diamond-like talent named Albert Pujols.

I have MANY years of experience in trying to appreciate steaming piles of dogshit.

When they took a nine-year, $198 million deal off the table last week, they replaced it with a five-year, $130 million offer that ultimately escalated in agonizingly slow increments as the week went on.