I like Yasiel Puig. I like him and I say this with complete confidence that you may not share my opinion. In fact, I’m relying on it.
His antics, his playing style, his comments to the media-he can be a guilty pleasure. You like his results, you love having him on your fantasy team, but you dislike the attitude and wish he were more…subdued?
But I think that unfiltered attitude is precisely why I like him so much. Not simply for the way it manifests on the playing field, but off it as well. Here’s why:
Most fans will like a player because he’s good, period. That’s fine. I’m not advocating for fans to read the autobiography of every player who’s ever reached the top (unless they’re my autobiographies, in which case I strongly advocate that fans read them). I’m simply stating the obvious: We pay attention to success and rarely hear about the unsuccessful. And why should we? If the bottom line in sports entertainment is that you either help your team or you don’t, and everything else is secondary to that, those who don’t help don’t matter.
Yet, even among the good players we hear about on a regular basis, the “franchise” players as they are sometimes called, there are those that eclipse the rank of known name and become something different. They become talking points and cultural buzzwords; they become polarizing.
I think that’s why I like Puig so much. It’s not that he’s good-really good-it’s that he forces you to form an opinion on how he plays the game, which, in turn forces you to form an opinion on what you believe really matters in the game, and that’s where the real fun is.
I think we can agree that the love and hate of players is largely provincial. Blue Jays fans disliked the cheating ways of Melky Cabrera in 2012, but they learned how to love him, and swiftly, when he signed a deal with the Jays for 2013. He was a cheat before the deal, but afterwards he was a man who served his sentence and we just hope the gains he had in 2012 weren’t all PED related.
Cardinals fans hate Puig right now because their own franchise players have renounced his flashy, overt style. Of course they have-he is their enemy. And of course the Dodgers have stood up for him: He is their insanely productive teammate. There is nothing more fundamental in sports than loving the behaviour of your own team and thinking it is the right way to approach the sport-especially if you’re winning-while passionately hating the behaviour of your rival-especially if they’re winning.
Why then, instead of accepting this cycle of professional sports life for what it is, do players continue to get their feathers ruffled when one of their own makes it to the top, has success, and goes about his business in such a way that broadcasts he’s good, confident, entertaining and living a dream in front of the whole world? Aren’t those the rewards for helping your team win? Isn’t success the ultimate validation, and beyond reproach?
Apparently not.
After Puig “pimped” what he thought was a home run but turned out to be a triple in game three of the NLCS, the Cardinals protested that he was going about his business the wrong way. That he was unprofessional, insulting the other team and acting bigger than the game. Carlos Beltran said, “I think he doesn’t know. He still thinks he’s playing somewhere else.”
Doesn’t know what? I’m pretty sure Puig knows he’s playing in the big leagues in Los Angeles, Calif. In fact, that’s exactly why I think he did what he did, and does what he does. Puig knows where he is and he loves it.
In fairness to Beltran, baseball has always been full of nuance, context and unwritten rules. It also suffers no shortage of hypocrisy, which is what the worn, weathered and liberally applied cliché of “playing the game the right way” is built on. The cliché has been thrown out many times during Puig’s short career and refers to the personal character and emotional expression of a player-how that player carries himself, something that can be linked to experiences as far from the actual game as it gets.
But here’s the rub: If sports is about winning, and winning is validating, and all that is not winning is meaningless, then Yasiel Puig is playing the game the right way because he’s helping his team win. Sure, he’s raw and impulsive, but he’s going to get better on the field as he matures.
And even if sports isn’t only about winning-if it’s not a cruel business of what-have-you-done-lately-Puig’s way remains the right one. He’s emotional. He’s exuberant. He’s a pain in the opposition’s ass. He’s enjoying the epic conclusion of the struggle to get where he is. If only we could all be so lucky and free in our successes.
When the game decides that it’s tired of unwritten rules and opts for concrete, clearly defined ones governing the expression of success, then angry Puig detractors will truly have something to shake their fists about. Until then, how a player expresses himself is only as offensive as what the less demonstrative-but no less arrogant-player decides to take offence to, or calls for retribution against.
And that might be the most peculiar thing about all of this: that there are so many players out there, some who’ve come from nothing, willing to say, “I’m not going to enjoy this dream come true in an overly outward fashion out of respect for the people who want to see me fail, and I don’t want anyone else to either.”
I’m sorry, but baseball is a game of failure. You might as well enjoy the times you succeed to the best of your ability, regardless of what anyone else thinks, while they last. Let the kids be kids, let Puig be Puig.