Hail, Hail King Albert!!!

As he explained why he would intentionally walk Albert Pujols even when baseball tradition and accepted strategy screamed not to, Los Angeles Dodgers manager Joe Torre offered a seven-word defense of his action: “Albert is in a class by himself.” If Pujols wasn’t then, he took a step closer to it Tuesday.
The St. Louis Cardinals first baseman won his second consecutive and his third career National League MVP Award, sweeping the first-place votes from all 32 writers around the NL cities. The Baseball Writers’ Association of America made the announced Tuesday afternoon on its Web site. The vote, as expected, wasn’t close, with Pujols out-distancing other candidates such as Milwaukee’s Prince Fielder and Florida’s Hanley Ramirez.
Pujols becomes the 10th player in the eight decades of the award to win three MVPs. Only Barry Bonds, who has seven MVPs in his career, has more than Pujols, Stan Musial and the seven other players also tied with three.
Only Musial and Mickey Mantle have three MVPs and three runnerup finishes like Pujols. Musial finished second in the voting four times. Pujols has eight top-five finishes in the MVP voting, and that ranks third behind Musial’s nine top-five finishes and Mantle’s nine top-five finishes.
Pujols is the first unanimous selection since Bonds in 2002. He is the seventh player to win the NL award unanimously, joining fellow Cardinal Orlando Cepeda (1967), Bonds and four others: Carl Hubbell (1936), Mike Schmidt (1980), Jeff Bagwell (1994) and Ken Caminiti (1996).
The MVP punctuates an offseason that has included the annual harvest of awards for Pujols. Earlier this month, he won a Silver Slugger, the Hank Aaron Award for the NL and, this past weekend in St. Louis, a National Sportsmanship Award.
Pujols joins Musial as the only Cardinals to win three MVPs in their career. Only the Cardinals and the New York Yankees now can boast multiple three-time winners in their club’s history.