Jeff Passan, Yahoo Sports (6/30/15)
Puig's reputation preceded his time with the Dodgers. During spring training 2013, Mitch Poole, the Dodgers' longtime clubhouse manager, assigned Puig's jersey number on a lark. "I thought it'd be funny to give him number 66 to reference 666, like he was Diablo," Poole told Knight. During the spring, Puig cottoned to the number and asked to keep it because he thought it was good luck.
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The players recognize as much. When the player who posed the addition-by-subtraction question reconsidered his thought, he told Yahoo Sports: "That's the biggest Catch-22. He's a top three or four talent in baseball."
And that hasn't changed. As much as Puig might slack in preparation, he continues to play the game at an unmatched level, his dynamism unfettered. Sometimes it's great, and sometimes it's laughable, and always it's exciting, and in a baseball culture that appreciates the steadiness necessary to survive its long season, Puig's ebbs and flows can be off-putting.
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"You guys tell me how you want me to play," Puig said during a meeting last year, according to Knight's book, and a few teammates spoke up, including then-Dodgers shortstop Hanley Ramirez, who said: "I just don't want your career to go the way my career went. All my teammates hated me because of the way I played."
The distaste for Puig is palpable, some of it fresh, some still festering from the past. It's real, though, and 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.
Book: Disdain for Yasiel Puig by Dodgers Teammates No Longer a Secret
