From 2001-2010, Albert Pujols was the greatest player in baseball. Not even Alex Rodriguez could match the unbelievable numbers he was putting up. In each of his first ten seasons, he finished with no fewer than 32 home runs, 103 RBI, 99 runs scored, and 33 doubles, while his batting average never dipped below .312, his on-base percentage below .394, or his slugging percentage below .561. However, until he reached the minor leagues in 1999, the road to success wasn't very straight. Born in the Dominican Republic, he often had to bring his alcoholic father home from softball games. He and his family migrated to New York in 1996, when he was 16, but after witnessing a shooting at a grocery store just two months in, they moved again to Independence, Missouri, right outside Kansas City. As a senior at Fort Osage High School, he looked older, and opposing coaches walked him 55 times in 88 plate appearances in protest. Still, just in those 33 at bats, he crushed eight home runs. He received a baseball scholarship from Maple Wood Junior College in Kansas City, where he hit .461 with 22 home runs as a freshman in 1999.
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Even at the junior college level, that should be enough to get you drafted in the first couple of rounds, right? Wrong. Scouts saw his tremendous ability, but doubts about his age, thick build, future position, and signability scared teams off. A couple of scouts, most notably Red Sox scout Ernie Jacobs and Devil Rays scout Fernando Arango, saw something special in the kid whose home runs sounded like thunderclaps, but they couldn't convince their teams to sign the guy. Pujols actually had a tryout with the Devil Rays in Tropicana Field, and after he crushed balls all over the park, the team's brass still failed to show interest. When the Cardinals drafted Pujols in the thirteenth round, 402nd overall, Arango quit his job with the Devil Rays, having told the higher-ups that Pujols would one day hit 40 home runs in a season.
It didn't take long for Pujols to make the other 29 teams look dumb. He started the 2000 season with Class A Peoria, where he batted .324 with 17 home runs and 32 doubles in 109 games, earning a promotion to High Class A Potomac. There, he hit .284 with a pair of home runs and eight doubles in 21 games, and he was promoted all the way to AAA Memphis, where he played his final three games of the season, batting .214. At this point, just a year after the 1999 draft, it was apparent that Pujols should have gone at least ten rounds higher. Pujols would would make the case that he was better than the draft's "Big Two" Josh Hamilton (first overall, Devil Rays) and Josh Beckett (second overall, Marlins). In 161 games as a 21 year old rookie for the Cardinals, he hit .329 with 37 home runs, 130 RBI, and 47 doubles, and he wouldn't slow down for a full decade. On September 10th, 2003, he hit home run number 40 of the season, and he promptly called Arango. Pujols would reach 40 home runs again in 2004, 2005, 2006, 2009, 2010, and 2015, winning NL MVP awards in '05, '08, and '09. That 2003 season turned out to be one of the greatest in the history of baseball, as he batted .359 with 43 home runs, 124 RBI, 137 runs scored, 51 doubles, and just 65 strikeouts in 157 games. Now, it's safe to say that Pujols is not only the greatest player to come out of the 1999 draft, but the greatest to come out of any subsequent draft aside from 2009 (Mike Trout).
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