It was obvious that Pujols was lying about his age long before I even knew what plantar fasciitis was. What a weird comment. Not really, since there's no actual evidence that he's not as old as he says he is. While it's never really all that surprising if a LA player is revealed to have done something like this, given that Pujols was already in the system and a new player when 9/11 happened and baseball faced a serious visa/immigration crackdown then (which is how a bunch of guys got caught within a relatively small time span) it's even more unlikely that he'd get away with this. Pretty much the only major exceptions with guys playing at that time were Soriano (because of his circuitous route through Japan) and Tejada. I think he may have escaped some of that scrutiny since he was well established in the US and went to high school and juco here. He's definitely not your everyday case and I'm pretty certain he lives in St. Louis year round. He's also been a US citizen since 2007, which I suppose would have probably caused some added attention to his birth date. Who knows? There was already uncertainty about his age even before he was drafted, and they were really looking to spot falsified visas and immigration documents right when he was a brand new player; between that and, like you said, that he then always went through the citizenship process makes it pretty unlikely that he would have gotten away with this. The crackdown on athlete visas post-9/11 was incredibly tough and a ton of eyes would have been on Pujols because of all of the suspicion on him from high school onward.