Good news. There is at least one role model left in sports.

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Take a rare glimpse behind the curtain, inside a batting cage near Pujols’ home outside St. Louis. Early on a January morning, he arrives with a quarter-size blister on his right hand, yet he pulls on a batting glove and keeps hitting. After a few swings, his batting practice pitcher, Yankees Class-A manager Torre Tyson, who lives near St. Louis and whose father, Mike, played for the Cardinals, notices blood seeping through the glove. Pujols takes it off, wraps the hand in athletic tape and pulls on a new glove. Within a few swings, there is more blood.

It is not Tyson’s job to offer opinions. His instructions are to throw the ball hard, down the middle, for as many swings as Pujols needs. He feeds Albert roughly 125 pitches every morning but Sunday. Tyson has been doing this for three winters, since he and Pujols met at the public facility, and the two have developed an easy familiarity. So after two blood-soaked batting gloves and a roll of athletic tape, Tyson speaks up. “Albert, you know you don’t have to keep hitting,” he says. “We can stop now.”

Pujols fixes him with one of his more serious stares and replies, “You know what I’m going to say, don’t you?” Tyson knows. It’s the same thing Pujols says every time a teammate or Tyson suffers a minor injury or faces some other bit of unpleasantness. He says it when Tyson shows up at 7 in the morning and says his arm is hanging like a snapped branch, and he says it this time: “Would you play if it were the seventh game of the World Series?”

“But Albert,” Tyson continues, stretching the limits of his job description, “it’s a Monday in January. It’s not the seventh game of the World Series.”

In response, Pujols pulls off the bloody batting glove and the bloody tape. He rewraps the hand, puts on another glove and gets back to into the cage. Tyson shrugs and goes back to throwing, hard and down the middle.

- Tim Keown, ESPN Magazine. (Photograph by Dan Winters)