The 500 club has another member, but it’s no longer greeted with excitement.

Albert Pujols became the 26th player to hit 500 home runs in major league baseball last night. He is now officially part of a very exclusive club, but it really doesn’t feel that way. The Steroid Era has more carry than a Pujols long-ball, and as we react to one of the greatest hitters, not just home run hitters, reaching this milestone, you have to reflect on how little it truly mattered last night at Nationals Park in Washington.

Statistics don’t seem to mean anything anymore in baseball. Is this particular 500 real? That probably isn’t fair to Pujols, who has a career .321 batting average and the second greatest strikeout-to-home-run ratio behind some guy named Ted Williams, so he has been great for a long time. But when I read things like ‘Pujols is now the second active player with 500 home runs’, I have to cringe because that other ‘active’ player is Alex Rodriguez, currently banned for the season for the very thing that brings these records into question: performance-enhancing drugs.

A-Rod is as active as a pitcher waiting for Tommy John surgery, and he knows it. Flipping back to last night and Pujols became the first player to hit numbers 499 and 500 in the same game. He is up to eight on the season at this early stage having played in just 99 games in 2013, a staggering turnaround at age 34 that you again start connecting the steroid dots with. I am, for the record, trying hard to believe the Angels star has done this clean. I want to give Pujols the benefit of the doubt. He had a terrific career with the Cardinals but for many his rejection to stay with St. Louis in order to take a lot of money with the Angels rubbed some people the wrong way. It is fair to say that St. Louis probably didn’t want him unless it was on their reduced terms, and I don’t begrudge him for taking a better offer.

Something else that I don’t think helps Pujols is his recent suing of former major-league slugger Jack Clark for defamation after Clark said that Pujols used PEDs. Pujols dropped the lawsuit after Clark apologised. Is it just me who wonders why Pujols would drop a case he reacted so much to simply because Clarke said sorry?

Before 1999, only 15 players had hit 500 home runs, but since then there have been 11. Fishy? You bet.

Make one thing clear; hitting 500 home runs is like reaching 3,000 hits – you are a lock for the Hall of Fame. But there is an asterisk attached to so many records in baseball nowadays. Unlike Derek Jeter’s 3,000th hit two seasons ago, Pujols’ 500th homer received less attention as he stepped up to make history. MLB.TV had a live look in, but that was it. I didn’t even ‘look in’, instead finding out on Twitter before watching the replay. Yep, there it goes, another mid-30’s ball-player has broken a record. What’s next? History, I’m sorry to say, suggests that this may be tainted.

Pujols is now in the company of some great hitters, and I believe he deserves to have his name brought up in the same conversation with the likes of Lou Gehrig, Babe Ruth and Jimmie Foxx.

The 34-year-old is the third Dominican-born player to reach 500, but the other two are associated with PEDs – Sammy Sosa and Manny Ramirez. So instead of saying ‘wow, that is awesome’, we are used to getting burned having celebrated a ‘genuine’ piece of history. People say ‘how dare they cheat’, others say they want to watch longer home runs and 110mph fastballs so they don’t care that players are juicing, but what it ultimately comes down to is people within the sport talking about steroids more than any other. The NFL has a cocaine problem, a marijuana problem and a steroid problem, but it isn’t seen as a problem because nobody cares. Soon enough, baseball statistics and comparisons with records won’t mean a thing. Unless you were around before the Steroid Era, even before that, your numbers have a touch of suspicion about them.

But we do know Albert Pujols is still relevant, no small thing after his injury-plagued season last year. He is seeing and hitting the ball in April like he did as a Cardinal. Ultimately, baseball fans want to see the best players perform to their best abilities. That is why I have made a note to self; I will not ignore the next ‘live look-in’, for fear that one day I may actually miss out on true history.