The Los Angeles Dodgers are finally getting the superstar results from Yasiel Puig, and the timing couldn’t be better.
This time last year the Los Angeles Dodgers would have struggled to find a way to trade Yasiel Puig for anything of value. Heck, they might not have even been able to find an Indy Ball style trade of a fielder for two buckets of balls and a pack of sunflower seeds. Things had gotten that bad for the mercurial outfielder in LA.
What a difference a year makes.
Sure, Aaron Judge has gotten the lion’s share of the headlines by waking up and hitting two massive home runs in the ALCS, but there is no ignoring the fact that Puig has been, hands down, the best player in the playoffs this year. With two more hits in Game 3 of the NLCS, Puig has pushed his line this postseason up to a stratospheric .429/.538/.762 with two doubles, a triple, a homer, six RBI and more walks than strikeouts.
To call Puig’s 2015 and 2016 seasons an absolute disaster would be kind. Injuries limited him to 183 games and a .260/.323/.425 line with 22 home runs and 83 RBI. The antics off the field that could be ignored when he was posting All-Star numbers his first two years in the league were no longer cute and an interesting circus act. He bottomed out last season when the Dodgers sent him down to Triple-A, a demotion that was soon followed with an expletive-laced Snapchat post the night after a loss.
Puig eventually made it back to the big leagues last year but hit .211 in the playoffs with no extra-base hits or walks. He spent most of the 2016 season on and off the trade block, but without much bargaining power, the Dodgers were forced to hang onto their right fielder.
Slowly but surely he has matured this season. Perhaps finding himself exiled to Triple-A last summer woke something up within Puig. His only real brush with controversy this year was a double-bird salute to fans in Cleveland in June. Even that pales in comparison to Puig slip-ups of past years. He has been on time, a leader on the field (where he posted the highest defensive value numbers of his career), in the dugout and hit .278/.374/.533 in the second half.
The Dodgers have put up with a lot from Yasiel Puig over the years, but their patience is being rewarded now more than ever. At his best, Puig is a legitimate five-tool threat and has the potential to carry a team for weeks at a time. Is he going to challenge Mike Trout for LA baseball supremacy — probably not. Think more Justin Upton than anything else, with his notorious hot streaks.
Much has been made of Puig’s immaturity during the first four years of his Major League Baseball career. Rightfully so. He was a train wreck at times, alienating teammates left and right — fighting with Matt Kemp, possibly driving Zack Greinke to sign with the Arizona Diamondbacks and allegedly having Clayton Kershaw demand the front office unload him — and giving the Dodgers every reason to trade him. The blame for the behavior that made him tabloid fodder ultimately has to fall on Puig, but the Dodgers could have done a better job handling a young prospect who had played all of 63 games in the minor leagues after escaping Cuba, was still dealing with the handlers that had delivered him to free soil and hit .436/.467/.713 in his first month in the big leagues. Given his first taste of freedom and celebrity after growing up under a despot, Puig went wild.
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The entire Puig ordeal has been a learning experience for the Dodgers, the player and the league in general. At 26, Puig is finally settling in with the Dodgers. He is not the phenom who took the world by storm in 2013 and probably won’t go down as a first-ballot Hall of Famer, but he is also leaving behind his worst characteristics while remaining the fun-loving ball of energy we all fell in love with after watching him play baseball for 30 seconds.