I made it to Busch III for the second time yesterday. The first time I made it, I marveled over Albert's, uh, defense. It turned out I was a day early for the more famous of Albert's skills. I was more fortunate this time around. We're running out of superlatives for Albert Pujols, but it suffices to say that he's the reason people make 8-hour round trips to spend hundreds of dollars at the new stadium. Other notes from the game:

• Albert probably shouldn't have admired the second homer quite like he did. I don't care about the "showing-up the pitcher" stuff. Rather that second shot was a bullet that barely cleared the wall. It would've been embarrassing to end up with nothing more than a single on a ball hit that hard.

• Anthony Reyes threw nothing slower than 88 in the first inning, and he K'd the side. That's an indication of the movement and location of his fastball. Obviously he looked solid overall, although it was the Pirates and Phil Cuzzi can cut both ways. I didn't have the greatest vantage point, but it looked like Cuzzi gradually evolved from a generous strike zone at the beginning to a miserly strike zone in the 7th.

• One thing that was clear from my seat was that Ronnie Belliard came unglued against Ian Snell. In the unlikely event he returns next year, LaRussa might want to sit Belliard against Snell. Actually if Snell had lasted longer, I would've pinch hit Jose Vizcaino for Belliard the third time through. Belliard looked that bad.

• Jason Bay looked like he was trying to run with cement shoes on Yadier Molina's double down the left field line. When Yadier looks faster than you do, then it might be time to run a level-two diagnostic. After the series Bay had, I'd be wondering if he caught that concussion disease from Jim Edmonds.

• Jason Isringhausen in 2006 reminds me of Mark Mulder in 2005. He's managing to hold it together to be an average reliever, but it wouldn't surprise me if he goes Danny Graves on us in 2007. The stadium had cleared out by the 9th LA-style, so the people giving him the sarcastic cheers probably weren't the Cellphone Sonnys.

• There were only four ticket sales/will call windows open on the Sunday before Labor Day. The Triple-A ballparks I've visited have that many queues and their crowds are one-fifth the size of yesterday's at Busch. The lines predictably were long for us poor regular folk, but there were plenty of windows for VIPs and ticket adjustments. Put that on the fix-it list.