Albert Pujols Agrees to 10-Year Deal with Angels: Is Deal Too Long?

Albert Pujols has reportedly agreed to a deal with the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim for 10 years and $254 million. Look, the money is what it is, and if the Angels win as many World Series with Pujols as the St. Louis Cardinals did with him, it's hard to argue paying the guy that $25 million per year.

I guess. I mean, this is like Monopoly money to us, isn't it? It's almost hard to imagine paying someone $25 million per season to play first base and hit home runs, especially when we all know that Pujols has likely rounded past the halfway point of his Hall of Fame career, leaving us to wonder how many years he will still be able to put up the kind of numbers that warrant this kind of contract.

Forget about the money for a second. Pujols is the best hitter in baseball and maybe the best right-handed hitter in the history of the game. There's little debate that Pujols—who has finished in the top five in MVP voting 10 times in 11 seasons—is one of the all-time great players. Paying him more money than anyone else in the game (or anyone not named Alex Rodriguez) is what we had to expect when he became a free agent.

But 10 years?

Sure, if teams wanted to sign Pujols they needed offer that length of contract, but how long can the Angels realistically think Pujols is going to be playing at the level that justifies a contract this immense?

Pujols has been relatively healthy in his career, never playing fewer than 143 games in any of his 11 seasons. But he's 31 years old (with some reporters suggesting this offseason that he might actually be older than that), meaning that he'll be in his early 40s at the end of this contract.

Barry Bonds was still slugging the ball at that age, but many suspect his performance was, for lack of a better term, enhanced. Will Pujols be able to sustain that level of performance into his 40s without the extra benefits players in the Bonds era were able to enjoy?

If not, or if the Angels went into this deal assuming a five- to seven-year window with Pujols at the top of his game, the contract could read more like a seven-year deal for $36 million per season...with three freebies tacked on at the end.

Of course, we're talking about Albert Pujols, who has just one season in his career hitting below .300—.299 in 2011 after a horrendous start—with an OPS of under 1.000 just three times in his career. It's certainly not fair to assume he won't still be productive at the end of this contract. I wouldn't bet against the fact that by moving to the American League and being able to utilize the DH spot whenever he gets too old to play first base every night, his bat won't be just as productive in eight to 10 years as it is now.

Besides, if Pujols brings two World Series titles to Anaheim during this contract, will anyone out there care if he's taking a few $25 million victory laps a decade from now? Arte Moreno won't.