Despite offseason OssaTron treatment, King Albert's heel is still on the fritz.

"It's still bothering me," Pujols said before taking the stage to sign autographs at the team's annual Winter Warm-Up fan festival. "I think I'm gonna do another treatment, hopefully, before I go down to Spring Training. It felt good for awhile, and then the last week or so it's been bothering me a little bit. It's something that I'm pretty sure I'm gonna go through again this year, because it's too late to do surgery."

Pujols has averaged 156 games over the past two seasons all while posting record-breaking numbers, despite a sprained right elbow in 2003 and heel problems in 2004, so this heel problem shouldn't be anything for us to be too concerned about... right?

"I'm not gonna go through the same thing that I went through last year. I don't think my body can handle that back-to-back years.

Crap. I already had to sit through 2 hours and 43 minutes of Wolfgang Peterson's painful recreation of the Homeric epic, now I have to worry about sitting through 162 games of this?

Dog help us.