Kuzul

Before all the confetti and empties were picked up from the streets of Kansas City after the Royals had their World Series parade, the Major League Baseball hot-stove season had its first blockbuster trade. 

When the Los Angeles Angels decided to give up a significant return package to acquire all-world shortstop Andrelton Simmons from the Atlanta Braves, it was the kind of deal that could result in both clubs receiving game-changing players.

The Braves might end up with a pitching gem in prospect Sean Newcomb, but we already know the kind of defensive impact Simmons can have on a team. For the Angels, he could become the kind of player who alters the franchise’s fortunes, especially within an era that better understands and values defensive wizardry.

After all, Ozzie Smith is in the Hall of Fame with similar below-average offensive numbers, and Simmons might end up being a better defensive shortstop when his career comes to a close.

The question now is this: What other trade targets on the market, or potentially off the market, are the kind of franchise game-changers Simmons could become? There does seem to be a group of them to choose from, but, like Simmons, they are going to cost a team potentially great young talent.

This is when organizations have to balance their futures with the need to win now.

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Los Angeles Dodgers outfielder Yasiel Puig suffered through an up-and-down 2015 season and only played in 79 games thanks to two separate stints on the disabled list. He also started only one of the five games in his team’s loss to the New York Mets in the National League Division Series.

President of Baseball Operations Andrew Friedman believes the outfielder’s weight was one reason for the health issues.

Friedman commented on Puig and the Dodgers’ desire for him to lose that weight in a report by Dylan Hernandez of the Los Angeles Times: “That’s a focus. He has continued to get bigger and stronger each year. It may not be the optimal size for him to play 150 games, 150-plus games.”

It is a tricky balance because adding strength would likely result in more power at the plate, but Los Angeles needs the outfielder on the field. Friedman did acknowledge “the reports have been great,” regarding Puig’s regular contact with strength and conditioning coach Brandon McDaniel.

The Dodgers outfield is something of a question mark this offseason after Puig missed so much time with injury (and set career lows with a .255 average, 11 home runs and 38 RBI) and Joc Pederson hit .178 with six home runs after the All-Star break. Pederson drilled 20 home runs in the first half of the season but looked lost at the plate by October.

Hernandez said Los Angeles could look for Puig and Pederson to bounce back in the 2016 season “rather than pursue any offensive difference-makers on the free-agent market.”

The Hernandez article also pointed out Friedman wants to see Puig work on his swing mechanics in addition to his efforts to become leaner (listed at 6’2″, 255 pounds by Baseball-Reference.com).      

Trading Puig is one option during the offseason, but he will only be 25 years old during the 2016 campaign. He is also under club control for three more seasons and recently played 148 games in 2014 and hit .296 with 37 doubles and 16 home runs.   

If he can return to a similar form next year, the Dodgers will be a much more formidable offensive club.

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The Los Angeles Dodgers have a few priorities to address this winter. The list begins with hiring a new manager. Elsewhere, there’s what to do about star right fielder/everlasting headache Yasiel Puig.

Or, the Dodgers could address both priorities at once. All they have to do is hire Gabe Kapler as their new skipper and let him deal with Puig. It could be as simple as that. For, you know, reasons. 

But we’ll get to those later.

For now, understand it’s hardly a foregone conclusion that the Dodgers are going to hire Kapler to replace the departed Don Mattingly. He’s been mentioned as a heavy favorite for the job, including by Buster Olney of ESPN.com and Ken Rosenthal of Fox Sports, but there are others in the mix.

Bill Plaschke of the Los Angeles Times has reported that former Dodger Dave Roberts is also on the club’s radar and that his stock may be rising. Per Jim Bowden of ESPN and MLB Network Radio, there are also quite a few other candidates in the mix:

But as outlined by Dylan Hernandez of the Los Angeles Times, Kapler remains an intriguing choice. His current position as the Dodgers’ farm director gives him plenty of familiarity with the organization. And as a former player who spent a dozen years in the majors and has since embraced analytics, he could be a rare skipper who speaks the language of both the front office and the clubhouse.

There’s also this: Out of all the Dodgers’ managerial candidates, Kapler might be the best equipped to turn Puig into a superstar.

Mind you, it does require some skepticism to presume that Puig needs to be “turned into” a superstar. Even after a trying 2015 season—in which injuries limited him to 79 games and he posted a career-worst .758 OPS—Puig‘s career still looks like that of an exceptional player.

In three seasons, Puig has racked up a .294/.371/.487 slash line. That gives him a career .858 OPS, which equates to a 141 OPS+, which places him among the league’s top 15 hitters (min. 1,000 PAs) since 2013. And even after his rough 2015, WAR still rates him as one of the game’s top five right fielders.

So, there. Puig is a really good player. As well he should be, as 6’2″, 255-pound bundles of strength, speed and electricity aren’t mass-produced (yet…).

But if we allow ourselves to be more realistic for at least a second, Puig has indeed earned skepticism about his superstar status.

Rather than he is a superstar, it’s more accurate to say Puig can be a superstar. The difference between “can be” and “is” comes down to consistency, a concept that has thus far eluded Puig.

To illustrate, behold a chart of his month-to-month OPS:

Granted, the various injuries Puig has dealt with haven’t helped. But pinning his inconsistency on the injury bug is unfair to the injury bug. Just as much as his injuries, Puig‘s inconsistency is owed to the fact that he’s just, well, inconsistent.

At the plate, his inconsistency comes from all-too-frequent lapses in pitch recognition and plate discipline. On the bases, his recklessness can just as easily lead to a comedy of errors as it can results. And though his defense features some amazing throws, he also makes it hard to ignore his comes-and-goes effort level and his penchant for overthrowing cutoff men.

Vin Scully, the Dodgers’ legendary play-by-play announcer, calls Puig “the Wild Horse.” In light of how he carries himself off the field, that’s too perfect.

But just as noteworthy, of course, is that Puig‘s nickname also applies to how he carries himself in general.

Puig‘s assorted behavioral issues—with tardiness, with his temper, with his work ethic, etc.—were well-documented in 2013 and 2014. And though many of his transgressions seemed overblown, it became harder to back that perception in 2015.

Jeff Passan of Yahoo Sports noted that Puig‘s behavior actually improved throughout the year, but Molly Knight’s book The Best Team Money Can Buy pulled back the curtain on Puig‘s contentious relationship with Mattingly and with his teammates.

“[Mattingly] had to deal with Yasiel Puig, who’s phenomenally talented, sells tickets…and he’s a basket case,” said Knight in an interview with Grantland’s Jonah Keri. “He flouts all the rules, skips BP, shows up late. What do you do? Bench him and watch your team lose? Or not punish him and piss off 24 other guys?”

In Mattingly‘s defense, he did try to find the right gloves for handling Puig. There were plenty of times in which he stood up for Puig. And as Knight hinted at, it’s also to Mattingly‘s credit that he didn’t let Puig‘s antics get in the way of the Dodgers’ winning three straight NL West titles.

But for all that Mattingly did well, his style of managing Puig can still be second-guessed.

Though there were instances in which Mattingly defended Puig, there were also instances in which he couldn’t hide his frustration with him, and instances in which he effectively used the media to challenge Puig to shape up and become more mature. Mattingly also wasn’t shy about benching Puig, most infamously when the Dodgers were facing elimination in the 2014 postseason.

For Mattingly, Puig was a problem child. His response was generally to treat Puig as such. From three years’ worth of material, we can gather this wasn’t the best approach for handling Puig.

Which brings us, finally, back to Kapler.

If the Dodgers hire him, they could at least count on his approaching The Great Puig Project with enthusiasm. During his rise to prominence as a writer and TV analyst, Kapler made it clear he’s a big fan of Puig‘s style. Writing at Gammons Daily in 2013, Kapler even went so far as to write that Puig was “the most charming, exciting, engaging and flat out fun player that I’ve ever witnessed.”

Knowing this, Kapler likely wouldn’t be overly preoccupied with getting Puig to leave his “Wild Horse” days behind him on the field. If nothing else, that could help Kapler get on Puig‘s good side.

But lest anyone worry about Puig running amok under Kapler‘s watch, that likely wouldn’t be the case. Simply getting on Puig‘s good side would be only half the battle for Kapler. The other half would be solving the consistency question, and he has both the training and the ideas for the task.

Kapler has experience dealing with raw young talents like Puig. He was the manager for the Single-A Greenville Drive back in 2007, where Nick Cafardo of the Boston Globe said Kapler drew “rave reviews” for his performance. More recently, Pedro Moura of the Orange County Register highlighted how Kapler has used a data-driven approach to help get Dodgers youngsters on track. 

Of course, this raises the question: Kapler may have the right kind of background for a job that requires getting the most out of Puig, but how exactly would his approach differ from Mattingly‘s?

Fortunately, there’s no need for wild guesses. Kapler pretty much told us what he would do.

In March 2014, Kapler penned a column for Fox Sports in which he argued that Puig‘s demeanor wasn’t an “attack on the organization.” Rather, it merely signified where Puig was in the developmental cycle. To Kapler, Puig looked not like a “man without experience” but a “man without boundaries.”

To establish the necessary boundaries, Kapler argued an authoritarian “Bobby Knight approach” was the wrong idea. Instead, the trick should be to give him role models to take after, which, rather than commanding Puig to follow, has to do with encouraging respected veterans to lead by example.

Or, in short: “The question isn’t ‘How should Mattingly handle Puig?’ It’s ‘How should the Dodgers family handle Puig?'”

Is this the right approach for handling Puig? Only time could tell. But it’s at least an approach the Dodgers seemingly haven’t tried yet. That alone makes it worth trying, and Kapler is certainly the right guy to carry it out.

If it were to turn out that Kapler isn’t the guy to get the most out of Puig, well, that could actually end up being neither here nor there. The Dodgers were able to win in 2015 despite the fact Puig was basically a footnote throughout the year. Between the talent they have now and the resources they have to add more talent, they could move forward into 2016 with a real chance to do that all over again.

If, on the other hand, it were to turn out that Kapler is the right guy to turn Puig into the superstar he can be, the reward could very well be the Dodgers turning into the superteam they so badly want to be.

Stats courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com and FanGraphs unless otherwise noted/linked.

If you want to talk baseball, hit me up on Twitter.

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The injury bug often rears its mighty head at the most inopportune times in Major League Baseball. The optimism of a team can quickly disappear when a key player goes down. And when the injury warrants a lengthy recovering time—sometimes—that optimism is crushed completely.

With the 2015 MLB playoffs right around the corner, postseason contenders will have their fingers crossed that injuries will be avoided from here on out.

All teams have had to deal with injuries this season—some worse than others. Many of those teams were able to overcome their misfortunes to this point, while others face recent injuries without much time to recover.

When it comes to playoff successes, the healthier team seems to have the better shot at long-term success. That’s not always the case, but a key injury down the stretch can sometimes be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

The slides ahead will focus on the key injuries that each playoff contender is currently facing this season and whether they can overcome said injuries in postseason competition. That’s not to say that every injury will be listed for each team, but key players will be noted as best as possible.

Teams that are listed would make the playoffs if the season ended as of Friday night.

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There was a time when Yasiel Puig was the hot topic du jour on a seemingly, um, jourly basis. That went double during October, a month when Puig’s every action was best observed through a microscope. And the more subatomic, the better.

But this year? Not as much. And the way things are looking now, it’s time to wonder if we’ll even be discussing Puig at all come the postseason.

Oh, don’t worry. The Los Angeles Dodgers will be there. They’ve caught fire and opened up a big lead in the NL West over the defending world champion San Francisco Giants. With less than 20 games to go before the end of the regular season, the Dodgers can plan on a third straight NL West title and begin pondering their postseason roster.

To this end, what to do with Puig could be their most difficult decision.

The star 24-year-old right fielder has had trouble staying on the field in 2015, participating in only 77 games due to assorted injuries. The latest of those is a right hamstring strain that has kept him out of action since Aug. 27, and which isn’t close to being 100 percent healed.

“We’ve got about a month and Yas has been out a few days, a week, maybe,” Dodgers skipper Don Mattingly said earlier this month, via Dylan Hernandez of the Los Angeles Times. “If it is a month, we’re pretty much right at the end of the year.”

This is to say Puig may not be healthy until the postseason arrives. At that point, it’ll have been over a month since his last major league game, leaving the Dodgers little to go off of regarding whether he’s worthy of a spot on their postseason roster.

It’s no wonder that Mattingly’s uncertainty about the situation comes across even in print: “I think we’d have to see a little bit. We just cross those bridges as we get there. I guess it would depend on what he’s able to do at that point.”

Of course, it is possible the Dodgers’ decision will turn out to be an easy one. If Puig makes it obvious that he’s not healthy yet, putting him on the postseason roster anyway would be folly. Those roster spots are too precious to waste on guys who can’t give it their all.

But then again, what to do with Puig and the postseason roster won’t necessarily be a no-brainer, even if he does show the Dodgers he’s healthy. Looking healed in drills isn’t the same as being 100 percent in games, after all.

And then there’s the possibility that the Dodgers could conclude that they don’t really need Puig anyway.

The notion of Puig being an expendable part of the Dodgers’ plans would have been absurd in either of the last two seasons. In notching a .925 OPS with 19 homers, he was arguably their best position player in 2013. Even as his numbers fell to an .863 OPS and 16 homers, you could still make the same argument last year. Puig was good. Really good.

But 2015 has brought a Wild Horse of a different color. When he hasn’t been injured, Puig has registered an OPS of just .764 with 11 homers and put up a 1.1 WAR, which puts him well short of the ranks of the Dodgers’ best players. Rather than great, he’s been merely solid.

That’s made it a wee bit easier for the Dodgers to make do without him. To their credit, they’ve done precisely that.

With Puig on the field, the Dodgers have gone a solid 42-35. Without Puig on the field, however, they’ve done a bit better at 41-26. Part of the reason for this is that the Dodgers offense hasn’t skipped a beat without Puig in the lineup. 

You can take it from the slash lines, which show no notable difference in the Dodgers’ offensive production if Puig’s contributions were erased entirely:

• Dodgers with Puig: .253/.329/.418
• Dodgers minus Puig: .252/.329/.416

Now, this could be read as the latest entry in the “Look How Overrated Yasiel Puig Is!” journal. But don’t do that. That’s a bad reading. Talk of Puig being overrated is in itself overrated.

Rather, this is more so a compliment to the depth the Dodgers have enjoyed this season. And where they’ve been deepest just so happens to be the outfield. Despite Puig’s extended absences, the Dodgers outfield has still managed to be one of the most productive in baseball.

Joc Pederson and Andre Ethier are mainly to thank for that, and Carl Crawford has also been solid when his own shaky health has allowed him to play. Elsewhere, role players like Kike Hernandez, Scott Van Slyke, Alex Guerrero and, most recently, Justin Ruggiano have also lent a hand.

And with the postseason fast approaching, it’s certainly not hard to imagine the Dodgers being willing to move forward with a combination of these players, rather than shoehorn Puig into the mix.

Because Crawford, Pederson and Ethier have been hitting well recently, they look like a solid starting trio. In light of their track records as lefty killers, Van Slyke and Ruggiano could be used as right-handed platoon partners for Crawford and Ethier. If he recovers well enough from his own hamstring strain, Hernandez would be the do-it-all utility guy and another right-handed bat to use in a pinch.

Of course, going with a crew like this would put pressure on Mattingly to push the right buttons in October. But as J.P. Hoornstra of the Los Angeles Daily News pointed out, Mattingly has been forced to do quite a bit of mixing and matching this month. He’s been getting his platoon practice, and the club’s .761 OPS this month says it’s working.

Bottom line: The Dodgers haven’t needed Puig’s presence to enjoy a productive outfield in 2015, and the pieces are there for them if they want to try to continue that trend into October.

…Or, they could just decide to roll the dice on a healthy (or healthy enough) Puig anyway. And as much as all of the above wouldn’t be the worst idea, this, too, wouldn’t be the worst idea.

Though Puig hasn’t been himself this year, he’s at least been better than average. That’s reflected best in how his .764 OPS translates to a safely above-average 110 OPS+. That’s notably better than Crawford’s 96 OPS+. And given that Crawford is also currently banged up after struggling with injuries for much of the year, one could argue for the Dodgers holding right field for Puig and projecting Ethier to start over Crawford in left field.

There’s also the notion that Puig is the best emergency center field option the Dodgers have, a rather important distinction given what’s known about Pederson. If he happens to go into another deep slump in October, the Dodgers would be happy they have Puig’s athleticism to plug into center field.

Lastly, there’s the notion that rolling the dice on Puig could result in a huge payout. He can be frustratingly inconsistent, but he’s also shown at times in 2015—including right before his latest injury—that he can be an absolute terror when he finds his rhythm at the plate. If he were to do so in October, he could put the entire Dodgers offense on his back.

So, while the Dodgers theoretically could tackle the postseason without Puig, even if he shows them he’s good to go, it’s a lot harder to say with any conviction that they should.

Which, if nothing else, is to say it’ll be interesting to see what the Dodgers do. The signs say Puig’s recovery is going to leave them with a tough decision to make: the allure of Puig’s talent, or the depth that’s allowed them to survive just fine without it?

Like Mattingly said, the Dodgers will cross this bridge when they get to it. But for now, it doesn’t hurt to send along the appropriate message.

Good luck with that.

Stats courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com and FanGraphs unless otherwise noted/linked.

If you want to talk baseball, hit me up on Twitter.

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The speculation just never ends for the likes of Carlos Gonzalez and James Shields.

Both standouts survived the July 31 non-waiver trade deadline and have so far survived the August waiver period, but the next big question is if those guys could be headed out of town when the offseason arrives. In the process of ranking the 10 MLB stars who are most likely to be traded this winter, an assortment of factors were taken into consideration:

• How extensively a given player has been linked to recent rumors
• His contract status
• How each player fits into the plans of his respective club

Nearly all the big leaguers who cracked this list are owed big-time money in 2016 and beyond. As it turns out, Gonzalez isn’t the only high-priced Colorado Rockies star who ends up landing right at the top of the rankings.

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This week brought teams to their 50-game marks, signaling the stretch run for the 10 postseason spots and Major League Baseball’s exciting scoreboard watching.

But Week 19 of this season brought us more than just wins, losses and jockeying in the standings. It brought us stupid quotes from a floundering team, a stupid decision from a franchise with an already spotty track record and more trade rumors, among other happenings.

The Chicago Cubs, Toronto Blue Jays and St. Louis Cardinals showed they will be forces through the season’s final turn. The Washington Nationals and Houston Astros showed they are vulnerable, and the San Francisco Giants took us back to the simpler times of the late ’80s and early ’90s.

More important than all of that, Boston Red Sox manager John Farrell announced Friday he was fighting a “highly curable” form of cancer and will not coach the team for the remainder of the season. He learned he had lymphoma earlier in the week, and chemotherapy will start next week.

The Farrell news is the latest in an eventful MLB week. We wrap it all up here in Bleacher Report’s 10 takeaways from Week 19.

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Los Angeles Dodgers outfielder Yasiel Puig missed 39 games earlier this season with a hamstring injury, though some of his teammates would have been happy if he hadn’t come back at all. 

Speaking to Jeff Passan of Yahoo Sports, one anonymous Dodgers player made his feelings about Puig clear. 

“We’ve talked about this,” the Dodgers player said. “At this point, it would be addition by subtraction.”

The same player later added that trading Puig would be a Catch-22 for the franchise because “he’s a top-three or -four talent in baseball.”    

In the same article, Passan noted that an upcoming book about the Dodgers written by Molly Knight called The Best Team Money Can Buy offers “anecdote after Puig anecdote that illuminates what makes him so off-putting to so many.”

Here are details of one incident involving Puig and Dodgers right-handed pitcher Zack Greinke that Passan cites from Knight’s book:

In 2014, during the Dodgers’ annual trip to Chicago, the team bus stopped downtown to allow rookies undergoing hazing to walk into a pizza place and emerge with food for the veterans. Some Dodgers players, not wanting to wait, skipped off the bus. 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.

Other instances mention Puig being scolded by Skip Schumaker once for showing up to the park 20 minutes late and being engaged in a relationship with the daughter of a minor league coach. 

Passan wrote that those previous problems with Puig have not convinced the Dodgers brass that they go beyond “occasional annoyance.”

Puig’s attitude and antics have long been a source of controversy since he debuted for the Dodgers in June 2013. Dodgers manager Don Mattingly benched him in the fifth inning of a game against the Chicago Cubs as a rookie when Puig threw a bat and sulked following a strikeout. 

In 2014, Puig was benched for the Dodgers’ home opener for showing up late to Dodger Stadium. 

Publicly, things have been quiet around Puig. Some of that could be due to the fact he’s only played 31 games, though he’s also quoted in the book as being flexible to team demands, saying during a meeting last year, “You guys tell me how you want me to play.”

As the player said, Puig is one of the best raw talents in baseball. He made the All-Star team last year and is hitting .289/.382/.465 so far this season. His .847 OPS is second among Los Angeles outfielders, behind rookie Joc Pederson (.913). 

At 24 years old, Puig has proved himself to be an exceptional talent. And he’s signed through 2018, so the Dodgers have every incentive to work with the Cuban star to hope he doesn’t become a bigger problem as the franchise tries to win its first World Series since 1988.   

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A lawsuit against Los Angeles Dodgers outfielder Yasiel Puig was dismissed by a federal judge Monday. 

According to Nathan Fenno of the Los Angeles Times, the dismissed suit claimed Puig had a Cuban man imprisoned and tortured: 

(Miguel Angel) Corbacho Daudinot sued under the Torture Victim Protection Act of 1991, which allows civil lawsuits in the United States against people who commit torture while acting in an official capacity for another country. He said that Puig falsely accused him of human trafficking — attempting to help Puig leave Cuba — which led to a seven-year prison sentence in 2010.

The report also notes that Corbacho Daudinot’s attorneys asked for the case to be dismissed, as he “wasn’t able to leave Cuba to participate in pre-trial discovery.” The trial was scheduled to take place in November before Monday’s ruling. 

Corbacho Daudinot filed the lawsuit in July 2013, per Dylan Hernandez of the Los Angeles Times, seeking $12 million after claiming Puig “knowingly made false statements” that resulted in him receiving a seven-year prison sentence. 

Puig’s harrowing escape from Cuba became public knowledge after Jesse Katz of Los Angeles Magazine chronicled it in April 2014. All five men piloting his vessel belonged to a smuggling ring “whose interests ranged from human cargo to bootleg yachts to bricks of cocaine,” according to Katz.

After Puig established residency, the Dodgers signed him to a seven-year, $42 million deal in 2012. He made his MLB debut in 2013 and has posted a .306/.386/.581 line in his 278-game career thus far while making the 2014 National League All-Star team.  

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Los Angeles Dodgers outfielder Yasiel Puig re-injured his hamstring after stepping awkwardly on first base Friday night against the San Diego Padres.

Continue for updates.

Puig Out vs. Padres

Saturday, April 25

Dylan Hernandez of the Los Angeles Times confirmed that Puig was out of the lineup for Saturday’s game against the Padres:

Bleacher Report’s Scott Miller reported that Puig was replaced by Andre Ethier after limping his way to the dugout. Bill Plunkett of the Orange County Register reported that Puig re-aggravated an injury to his left hamstring that’s already forced him to miss four games this season. 

Hernandez noted that he’s day to day. Ken Gurnick of MLB.com reported that a stint on the DL is possible.

Puig has battled some nagging injuries throughout his young career, which is currently in its third season. There hasn’t been anything that’s forced him to miss an extended period of time, though. 

The Dodgers will hope his latest injury setback falls into the same minor category. The good news is, when healthy, he’s been one of the team’s most dangerous hitters. That’s saying something given the amount of talent on LA’s roster.

The team does have some outfield depth should Puig be forced to miss some time. That said, none of the available options have the same type of top-end skill as the 24-year-old Cuban.

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