Albert Pujols, one of the Cardinals' most popular and enduring stars, won the World Series with St. Louis in 2011 and then signed with the Angels as a free agent in December of that year. Los Angeles gave him the world at the time: a 10-year, $254 million contract, plus a 10-year personal-services contract after that.

The Cards reportedly offered Pujols $210 million for 10 years, with at least $30 million of that deferred. Pujols went with the Angels. The money was greener. The grass was not.

Pujols just finished his eighth season with the Halos, and he has not won a postseason game since moving west. The Angels made it to the playoffs once, in 2014, and they promptly got swept by the Royals.

Now two players on the World Series-champion Nationals, Anthony Rendon and Stephen Strasburg -- beloved by their fan base, and who have never played a big league game in any other uniform -- are eligible to leave as free agents. Strasburg exercised the rights of his contract and opted out of it.

I hope they both stay.

This isn’t because I’m a Nationals fan, either. It's because I'm a baseball fan who watched Rendon and Strasburg help the Nats write one of the greatest baseball stories of all time. It's because of what Washington's record was after 50 games (19-31). Because it beat a 106-win team (the Dodgers) and a 107-win team (the Astros) along the way. Because the Nationals played all those elimination games.

I hoped that Bryce Harper would stay with the Nationals when he was the same kind of homegrown free-agent star that Rendon and Strasburg are now. The Nats offered Harper $300 million. He took a better offer from the Phillies -- $330 million, a longer deal than the one Pujols signed with the Angels, and one that will take Harper past his 39th birthday.

Harper took a better offer from the Phils, and then he watched his old team win its first World Series without him, instead led by two others -- Rendon and Strasburg -- who also grew up in front of Nationals fans.

At 27, Harper is still younger than both Rendon (29) and Strasburg (31). Maybe he can win a World Series with the Phillies, and sooner rather than later. Maybe the baseball part of Harper's deal will work out a lot better for him than it has for Pujols, as he approaches the final two years of his Halos deal. The Cardinals haven’t won a World Series since he left, but they sure played in one two years later. They also thought they might be on their way back to the Fall Classic until they ran into what Strasburg called the “buzzsaw” of the 2019 Nationals.

Strasburg was the Most Valuable Player of the World Series. I thought Rendon would have been just as worthy a choice. Maybe this championship will turn out to be the great moment of each of their careers, the way they performed in a magical October for themselves and their team. Strasburg went 5-0 in the postseason and gave the performance of his life, pitching into the ninth inning of Game 6, the second-to-last of the Nats' elimination games.

Rendon? He played 17 postseason games, had 20 hits, hit .412 against the Dodgers in the National League Division Series and .417 against the Cards in the NL Championship Series. Rendon helped turn around Game 5 of the NLDS with a late-game home run off Clayton Kershaw, right before Juan Soto hit another. Then, in the biggest game of his life, in his hometown of Houston, he reversed the momentum of Game 7 with his seventh-inning homer off Zack Greinke, after Greinke had dominated the Nats to that point.

Neither Rendon nor Strasburg could hit the market at a better time. Both are bigger stars than they have ever been. Both are going to get paid, either in Washington or somewhere else. But before they leave, they ought to at least think about what happened to a guy like Pujols, especially after he left the only team and fans he’d ever known.

I hope Rendon and Strasburg stay. Money’s always going to be green. The grass? Not always as much.