If Albert Pujols is serious about his deadline, he and the St. Louis Cardinals are closing in on their moment of truth. Pujols, the best hitter playing baseball today, is scheduled to report to spring training Feb. 16 and begin working out the next day.

According to Pujols, if he is not signed to a contract extension by the day he reports, he will cut off further talks and become a free agent after the season.

St. Louis position players have a Feb. 18 reporting date with the first workout the next day, but Pujols apparently plans to be early. Usually it’s the union that challenges a team’s effort to have players report earlier than the scheduled reporting date, but in this instance the team might want to tell Albert he can’t report until the scheduled date.

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Joe Gordon is a Pittsburgh Pirates fan, a “huge fan,” he said. He has been a season-ticket holder since the Pirates moved into PNC Park in 2001. Before that, when the Pirates played at Three Rivers Stadium, Gordon had access to seats in his employer’s suite there. His employer was the Pittsburgh Steelers.

As the Steelers’ public relations director from 1969 to 1998 and a lifetime Pirates fan, Gordon has had a close-up look at the two teams and has seen how one soared from the dregs of the National Football League to its super stratosphere while the other plummeted from the upper regions of Major League Baseball to its dregs.

The resulting status is on display this week. The Steelers are in the Super Bowl for the eighth time, having won it a record six times; the Pirates are licking their wounds once again, having suffered their record 18th successive losing season in 2010.

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What is it about the desire to own a baseball team that turns grown men, wealthy men into harebrained wackos?

Fred Wilpon announces that he may sell 20 percent to 25 percent of the Mets, and they can’t go public fast enough to declare their interest in buying what Wilpon is selling. Some of them go further, proclaiming their intention, or at least their desire, to buy more than Wilpon is selling.

But does Wilpon himself know how much of the team he is selling?

“This is how Hicks started with the Rangers: ‘I want to sell 10 percent,’ then 20 percent, then 30,” said an investment banker, referring to debt-laden Tom Hicks, who sold all of the Texas Rangers last year.

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