Yasiel Puig has been the talk of baseball since being called up by the Los Angeles Dodgers two weeks ago.
The 22-year-old Cuban phenom is batting .479/.500/.771 with four home runs in 13 games since joining the big club straight from Double-A. He won NL Player of the Week in his first week and quickly set a franchise record by recording 15 hits in his first eight games.
With the way he is hitting (and throwing), Puig looks like he may be one of the biggest bargains in baseball. But only a year ago, the seven-year, $42 million contract offered to Puig by the Dodgers seemed crazy. What is even more insane was that the Dodgers offered Puig that much money after only watching him once!
Logan White, who is considered one of the best scouting directors in MLB, watched Puig play in Mexico City last year, and that was all he needed to see to know he wanted to sign him.
“I wanted the player,” White recalled to the New York Post’s Joel Sherman. “And I will tell you how badly I wanted him: I would rather he come to us with the talent I saw and fail to turn those tools into anything than go someplace else and succeed. I couldn’t have lived with that.”
At the time, the Dodgers had very little information on Puig aside from the one workout. When White told one of the team’s cross-checkers how much they were planning to offer Puig, the cross-checker thought White was crazy. But White was confident in Puig and thought he could be a baseball version of LeBron James.
So far, White has been correct in his evaluation. And the $42 million investment seems minor. Sometimes you can just trust what you see and not overthink things and they will work out.
