Osmosing Yasiel Puig

You only clicked on this because "Yasiel Puig" is in the headline.

Sheep.

You're welcome to claim that you aren't of the ovine disposition, but you are. In fact, the quest for originality is one of the biggest selling points for most concepts and commodities. So, you're a sheep and so am I. And so are the people who make the stuff that we flock to.

Puig is definitely one of those things.

He's magnetic—but it goes both ways. His madcap hero impulses are so reckless it seems as if he's a Bo Jackson clone being controlled by a 10-year-old with a PlayStation controller. He does some ridiculous things on the field—that often require him to unleash his preternatural athleticism to correct his own flighty mistakes on a routine plays.

And then of course, there are the bat flips that come on towering homers and flyouts alike. His most notable transgression, perhaps, was a bat flip in the Dodgers NLCS series with the Cardinals last year. Puig hit a ball to right field that he thought was a home run—as usual. It wasn't, but he still turned it into a triple despite celebrating halfway to first.

Several other similar instances have led to a love vs. love-to-hate dialectic. It wasn't his first peacockish moment and it won't be his last.

In America—and presumably other places as well—things hatch from their shells, still muculent with the mire of new life. Then they grow and people start to notice, and before you know it, the inspiring little duckling that was just stumbling over blades of grass in yawning wonderment is decked out with camo and a tawdry novelty beard in a promo for an A&E reality show.

Same story with Puig.

In other words, he's been swallowed entirely by the cliches that inevitably swallow everything. There's nothing else you can really say about him, except maybe to say that there's nothing else you can really say about him.

In less than one full season, any mention of Puig has become a cliche—which is, in and of itself, a cliche.

His detractors have been polarized as racists and morons and his defenders seem to have a script with which they detract from his detractors. This article isn't any different. This thing is already oozing with pretense. It's all one big mess of arbitrary polemics.

Puig's own manager—Don Mattingly—has hesitated to start his most athletic outfielder in center, calling the 23-year-old "out of control." Some claim he doesn't respect the game, but he's often seen inviting kids to the ballpark or, as was the case on Friday, thanking Roberto Clemente for paving the his path to Major League Baseball.

It's not as if the baseball community is anesthetically going with the flow. Reading over the terabyte of different opinions is like wading through a swamp of glue. There have been some wonderful stories written—most notably the one that simply tells the story of his defection—if only for the previously unknown details of his Escape from Cuba.

We have been numbed to the fusillade of Puig narratives—or perhaps their sharpness has dulled. Either way, the way he plays the game will soon dissolve into some insipid, platitudinous solution of Puig being Puig.

Cliches are off-putting, but they're also part of the way we communicate, and more applicably, part of the way originality is absorbed by the mainstream. Whether or not that's a good thing is up for debate, but it will certainly seem like Puig will be much less ubiquitous when he is finally completely ubiquitous.

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