He just had the worst year of his 11-year career, he had 1 hit in 19 at-bats in six of the seven World Series games and he turns 32 years old in January. Is this a free agent some team would want to sign, let alone sign for $200 million or more?

Considering that he is Albert Pujols, yes, there are teams that will want to sign him now that he is a free agent, though not many because few teams feel they can afford the kind of contract Pujols will demand.

Pujols and fellow slugging first baseman Prince Fielder are the stars of this year’s class of free agents. Their off-season decisions are of unusually high interest because both players have spent their entire careers with their club, Pujols 11 years with the St. Louis Cardinals, Fielder six and a third years with the Milwaukee Brewers.

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The National Football League has had its lockout. The National Basketball Association is having its lockout now. Then there’s Major League Baseball, the granddaddy of all lockout and strike-affected sports leagues.

Far from a lockout or a strike, Major League Baseball is so awash in peace and tranquility that negotiators for the players and the owners are said by a baseball official familiar with the labor scene to be 90 percent, maybe 95 percent, finished with their talks for a new collective bargaining agreement to replace the one that expires Dec. 11.

Six weeks prior to the expiration of existing agreements in many labor negotiations of years past, the two sides hadn’t even agreed that the ball was white with red stitching.

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We interrupt this World Series to bring you the Bud Selig follies: the three-ring fiasco that the commissioner has allowed to fester and flourish and overshadow his game’s premier event.

“This is in the middle of baseball’s sacred period,” said a veteran baseball man with great respect for the game. “The commissioner issues guidelines and ignores them himself. We’re into the World Series, but this is all we’re talking about.”

The subject of Selig’s follies is the effort of the Chicago Cubs to wrest Theo Epstein from the Boston Red Sox to be their president of baseball operations. The Epstein epic has been an all-consuming subject of notoriety in a minimum of three major league cities – Boston, Chicago and San Diego.

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