The Week Yasiel Puig Was the Best Player in Baseball

The Week Yasiel Puig Was the Best Player in Baseball

I watched Yasiel Puig play baseball this year in person that might sound impossible to Baseball fans in the big 20204 but those who saw my Caribbean series video from this past February may remember that he’s still kicking it in foreign leagues ever since his time in MLB ended it makes sense that he’s still playing somewhere else because he’s still just 33 years old he’s younger than Freddy Freeman right now yet by the time 2022 rolled around Freeman wasn’t LA Dodger and pig was on this Korean team Freddy is hitting a bomb off of in this clip but if we’re still talking about p 11 years after his initial rise to start him in MLB that had to be some rise then huh all the rest of his career For Better or For Worse was made possible by at one point being unbelievably amazing at baseball and the time this just so happened to go down was his very first week in the majors yasi Pig had the most dominant first handful of games in MLB history and it’s time to relive them but first as quick of a summary as I can give on how we got here it wasn’t long before this that the baseball world didn’t even really know who Pig was he only signed a contract with the Dodgers about 11 months before his MLB debut for pig this was his 13th attempt to defect from his native Cuba to the United States to pursue an MLB career he did net himself a 7-year deal worth $42 million in the summer of 2012 though the largest contract ever for a Cuban Defector his first year in the minor leagues was outstanding until he got a staff infection all this was enough though for pig to enter 2013 as a consensus top 100 Prospect in the league and get him a spring training invite where he would hit over 500 yeah they say Elite hitters get hits three out of every 10 times Pig was doing it in better than five out of every 10 against professional pitching in a decent sample of 58 at bats Buzz started to swirl that he could somehow already cracked the LA Dodgers roster to start 2013 but rational heads prevailed and said hey wait a second he still just got here let’s see if he’s ready by putting him in double A yep he still looked ready and when two outfielders got hurt on the Dodgers big league roster and the team slips all the way down to 23 and 32 to start the year they finally made the call to give Puig a chance and to say he made the most of that chance is as big an understatement as I’ve ever made Pig’s first game on June 3rd seems to be just an ordinary Monday night in La against the instate rival San Diego Padres the Dodgers make the extremely aggressive choice to lead him off in his first game giving him little to no time to process the major leagues around him before getting in the Box and as he steps into the box notice how there’s basically no Fanfare for him first coming up no real Ovation no real excitement from the crowd they have no idea what’s about to happen here do they Pig singles in his first at bat almost falling over on his face swinging so hard to make it happen he doesn’t have to wait too long for his second hit singling again in the sixth inning with a chance to blow the game open for the Dodgers in the bottom of the eighth he doesn’t exactly come through but does hustle down the line quick enough to prevent a double play in his first chance to be a late inning hero for the Dodgers he fails luckily for him he gets his second chance just a few minutes later and a high fly ball the Deep right field que to the track one hands it runs it back to first base out this is crazy he doesn’t even really Crow Hop here to build momentum he just kind of Chucks the ball while angling sideways from the warning track in right field to the first baseman on the Fly for a game-winning double play again this is his first ever MLB game this would be a better game than some guys would wind up having for their whole careers but luckily for p he would not be a case of a player winding up on this list because he’d have a better game the very next night the 10 pitch is swung on and line down the right field line in the corner and there goes que on his way into second he will hold up with a stand up double to prove he is human he sneaks in a ground out after this double but Pig then decides he’s sick of failing and is ready for his first big league home run unleashing a bat flip in the process and a high fly ball into deep left Center Havana Cuba has arrived and we have a 5 five this is before Jose Bautista we weren’t willing to all admit those were fun and cool in baseball yet so bat flipping on your first career home run in just your second game in 2013 was kind of unheard of but instead of being labeled as a cocky pompous Showboat Dodgers catcher AJ Ellis later claims that pig changed the culture around the clubhouse being good will certainly do that on top of just playing like you’re having fun and he wouldn’t have to wait long to be really good again and the Fly ball the Deep right blanks to the track it is gone he has hit another one through two games pig looks like a cross between tremendous Jackson and Pablo Sanchez and he’s reinvigorating the Dodgers fan base at a pace not seen since the era of mannywood so maybe on purpose for all I know he goes 0 for four with two strikeouts in his third career career game maybe to give Padres some self-esteem back maybe to remind the world that he is still in fact just a human being I don’t know unlikely scenarios there for sure but it’s just hard to believe this guy was capable of failure at all based on the first two games he set the standard with do not get sucked into P looking bad for long though because he immediately hits a single on the second Pitch he sees in game number four for most of this game neither the Dodgers nor the Atlanta Braves can muster up much offense though the Braves are scoreless through S and 1 half Innings the Dodgers have just one run on four hits the baseball Gods then descended on this game and decided hey now we need some action here the Dodgers feel like making it interesting and load the bases for Guess Who and a high fly ball into deep right field I don’t believe it a grand slam home run of course of course he did this he had made a man with over 60 years experience announcing games for the Dodgers speechless it takes a lot to stun a man who’s probably seen at all before nothing better to be absolutely speechless to sum up a situation what he hadn’t seen was a 22-year-old rookie do all this in just their first four games he came he saw and he conquered seeing just nine pitches in his four at bats in this game that means he was attacking early and often and it was working they not even giving him first pitch fast balls and he’s still successfully ambushing balls over the fence his slugging percentage through four games is one dotting not his Ops his slugging alone for all you non dorks out there that means he’s averaging the damage of at least a single per at bat he steps into the box even in a 4 game sample that means you’re causing a lot of stress to the opposing pitchers his first two at bats in game number five wind up being pretty routine outs so P gets a mental alert of like hey I haven’t done something sick in like 22 hours or so that’s boring and let’s see it is in the stand he’s got in the game he is just inevitable and the Braves finally catch on to this in the eighth inning Ty game runner on third base two outs pig is intentionally walked he receives his first MLB intentional walk 13 games before working his first unintentional walk that’s the fear he’s instilling in teams with just five MLB games to his name the Dodgers would go on to win this game in the 10th on a walk-off wild pitch their fourth win in the first five PE games the magic is just infectious and he’s only been here for 5 days we a showman he realizes that teams are expecting him to hit home runs like it’s the sun coming up so to catch the Braves off guard he tries to bunt his way on to start game number six he’s out hey at least he’s trying to spice it up huh he singles down the right field line in his second at bat of the game then has another Keen realization he hasn’t made an insane Outfield throw in like five whole days we up with it rounding second is Simmons and a great throw I got him an infield single to start the bottom of the eighth starts a rally that comes up just short and the Dodgers lose two to one the Dodgers might not stay consistent and drop the win streak but Pig immediately hits a single in his first at bat of game number seven side note here baseball references game log list this as a single to quote deep center field look where this ball lands that is not deep center field like what before this game ends which would be an 8 to1 Dodger loss que knocks two more hits his 12th and 13th in his first seven games this man hit 464 with four home runs a 483 OBP 964 slugging percentage and 1. 447 Ops in his first seven games just an ungodly start to have as a 22-year-old rookie and if you want to expand this to eight games to include a full Monday through Monday on the calendar his average goes up to an even 500 as he’d go three for four against the Arizona Diamondbacks in the next game while the numbers never got any sexier on paper than the first eight games he still treaded water in the insane tier for the rest of his first month to go down in the history books hitting safely in 22 of his first 26 games only Joe demaggio had more hits in a player’s first calendar month in MLB history quig also joined dagio as the only two players in MLB history with 40 hits and four home runs in their first month that’s it that’s the club he wedged his way into only 13 months by a rookie in mlbb’s expansion era beat it and that’s for any rookie season month not just the first one of a career his batting average for the first calendar month of a career absolutely shattered demaggio’s existing record there if there’s a word more violent than shattered I should probably use that to describe it instead because Pig just torched the league to start his career in a way very few have and a ton of the heavy lifting was done in that first week I’m only continuing the timeline past that week to show how ridiculous it is that he even kind of sustained it for any period longer than the initial length here the first week was the Apex and that was never topped both in initial hype and eye popping small sample size numbers but he was so good in that first month that major league baseball and his fans almost made him an Allstar off 20s something games in what would have been the fewest career games played for a position player before becoming an All-Star P almost did it or should I say MV p as he was being called in dodger toown but it wasn’t to be our old friend Freddy Freeman pulled out a bit more rational and logic iCal support to claim that final NL All-Star roster spot he finished second in NL Rookie of the Year voting in 2013 and 15th in NL MVP voting with only 104 games played all but one other hitter who placed higher in the voting had at least 25 more games played on the season than Pig but Pig mashed so much that he earned his keep on the ballot in a more than respectable placement alongside some of the best players of this era from here though there were a lot of high highs qu launches left field goodby and a lot of low lows double play trying to score now is p and he is out it’s a triple play 2014 he had a very strong First full season being an All-Star and earning down ballot MVP votes even if he clocked out of the Home Run Derby with exactly zero home runs and then for the rest of his career career he was just good at best mostly just all right why this could have seemed to be a disappointment for his career Arc is that the type of start he had was usually reserved for inner circle baseball legends his game never matched the standard that was set in his first week in The Bigs and by the end of the decade he was out of the league he would never make it to a second MLB contract hasn’t been in the league for 5 years now and seems to be on the outside looking in with just seven total Seasons played not a bad career by any means just one that didn’t clear the expectations he was creating with how talented he proved to be from the jump in the pantheon of Legends for starts like this pig was just normal why this didn’t feel like an Abrupt fall though was that he’s still played ever since his last MLB seasons in various countries whereas the last year we saw him in MLB P was a Cincinnati Red who almost fought the Pittsburgh Pirates all by himself then was all ready to fight them again even when he technically wasn’t even on the team anymore he’s still played for teams in Mexico Korea the Dominican Republic and Venezuela ever since in 20120 he was expected to be in Atlanta Brave until he tested positive for covid during his signing process and never actually got a deal done a report also circulated that he might get a chance in 2024 with the Tampa Bay Rays but that never came to fruition either what he’s really going to need to overcome in the eyes of MLB teams however are his personal issues that have started to come to light in the years since his last MLB game it has come out that he settled two lawsuits with women who claimed he assaulted them while a member of the Dodgers and in 2022 he faced charges of being involved in illegal gambling and lying to the US government about it it’ll be an uphill battle for someone who had built the hype of being the fastest rising young star of just a little over 10 years ago to earn a chance back into the league and that’s a shame no matter how you spin it he may not really deserve that chance back if he really did what he’s accused of but what seems to be universally agreeable is how much of his own potential he had squandered I will pose one last question for you watching though can Yasiel Pig be proud of his career my answer is yes detaching personal demons expectations he set for himself and those set by Outsiders and behavior issues he totally needs to work on and atone for he still achieved a successful career with standout memories and achievements in just his first week plenty of guys never even come close to and For Better or For Worse he’ll always have that start to look back on regardless of looking back at it with a smile or asking himself what could have been

Creator: @SRSMike
X: https://twitter.com/SRSMike

Yasiel Puig will go down with a complicated legacy in baseball history – however, we would never have talked about him at all without him having the best first week of a career in the history of MLB…
______________________________________
SOUNDTRACK – https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4mHOSFX_wdSjh_dEzZPnckwa51HYWsdl
SRS MERCH – https://starkravingsports.com
SRS X – https://twitter.com/starkravesports
SRS INSTAGRAM – https://www.instagram.com/starkravingsports
SRS TIKTOK – https://www.tiktok.com/@starkravingsports
______________________________________

FOR BUSINESS INQUIRIES – contact@tablerock.com

#mlb #baseball #sports