A Loooot Is Coming out about Yasiel Puig

Jayne Kamin-Oncea-USA TODAY Sports

Molly Knight’s book The Best Team Money Can Buy is set to come out in a couple of weeks. Now that people have gotten the chance to review it and skim through it, a lot of things have come out about the Dodgers most polarizing figure, Yasiel Puig

There’s bits of this on twitter going back since she started writing her book, but for the first time, another source goes into the depth of the problems Yasiel Puig has amongst his teammates.

"“We’ve talked about this,” one Dodgers player told Yahoo Sports. “At this point, it would be addition by subtraction.”"

The article is fascinating, and Knight’s book sounds like a quality read (even if the advertisement has been 99% Puig negativity), and for the first time a source that isn’t Molly Knight gives us pretty detailed about the dysfunction from the 2013-2014 Dodgers clubhouse! Whether that’s being “chided” in 2013 by potential worst active player in baseball, and overly taut gritbag Skip Schumaker over being 20 minutes late for a game. Or maybe it’s the idea that Puig’s jersey situation is being spun to reflect that his reputation is… the devil?

Or maybe you’re finding out that Greinke almost fought Puig over a bag of luggage in Chicago once in the middle of a rookie hazing ritual.

"When the bus was ready to leave, Puig was outside, looking for his luggage inside of the bay underneath the bus. After Puig ignored multiple requests to close the luggage bay, Greinke hopped off the bus, grabbed the suitcase in front of Puig and chucked it onto Michigan Avenue. Puig stepped toward Greinke and was restrained by reliever J.P. Howell."

Of course, this Puig stuff is being spun in a certain way, and the incident with Greinke should be taken with this decently sized grain of salt:

Puig’s been a sportswriter’s dream ever since he’s been in LA, he’s been the cliché that divides baseball audiences right down the middle, and this book sure won’t do any favors for the anti-Puig crowd, but hell the stuff in the article and presumably the book paint Puig’s teammates in a very bad light. For all the problems Puig has, he makes the Dodgers a better team and there has been nary a word said about the fact that Zack Greinke threw Yasiel Puig’s personal property in the middle of a street on a road trip once.

Or how the worst player on the 2013 Dodgers, who has likely only stuck around at the major league level because he, himself is the cliché about a clubhouse’s wet dream on how to play the game the right way, approached the rookie who along with Hanley Ramirez, saved the entire season and got pissy with him about showing up 20 minutes late.

I’ve never subscribed to the Puig drama as something that turns me away from the guy. He is incredibly compelling, if somewhat of an immature specimen, and now we have proof from a couple of prominent beat writers that this kind of stuff has been going around. However, he’s good enough to where this doesn’t matter a whole lot, production is production is production, and the last part of Passan’s article says it all

"the Dodgers know at the very least they need to monitor it so it doesn’t devolve into the scenario where they might actually be better without someone so good."

In the long run this is probably nothing and if a player’s perception within the clubhouse affects people’s view of him, so be it, but the complexity of the Dodgers clubhouse from 2013-2014 is far more than just “Yasiel Puig is a bad guy”, I imagine some of this stuff is overblown, and much of the stuff is spun in a way to perpetuate the “Puig is bad” narrative (cause that stuff sells). If nothing else, this situation is fascinating.