The constant balloon juice among advanced statistics nerds regarding current MLB free agent Yasiel Puig has been that he is in a decline. The majority of these clunks who continue to bring this up on Twitter point to fantasy baseball statistics such as WAR and entirely ambiguous stats such as DRS (Puig’s defense is a different story for another time). And sure, just looking at flat figgers on any baseballer is not going to tell the full story, but to simply chuck overall numberals such as WAR and write off any gamester as a result shows that these clunks are clearly not only not watching the battles, but also not making any attempt to penetrate the surface of the figgers.

You need to delve deeper, bros.

Let’s take WAR for instance. Those in the jeering section love to point to Puig’s career-high 5.1 WAR in 2014 falling to 0.5 last season. Now there are two things you need to factor in when looking at this particular sort of drop-off in figgers: one is the situation, while the other is the psychological aspect. To a certain degree, analytics does look at the situation but the psychological aspect not too much.

To begin with, Puig’s historic starburst in 2013, coupled with his overall 2014 numberals, have contributed to many diamond game guessers forgetting that he had about 150 fewer plate appearances and one-third of the amount of four-basers and RBIs in the second half of that season than he had in the first. So these same boobocrats who argue that Puig has fallen off since 2014 are arguing on a false premise because 2014 for Puig in itself was an incomplete assignment.

So let’s rewind back to the situation: Early in the 2013 flag pursuit, Don Mattingly’s lame ass was on the cusp of being told to go to Hoboken. Then Puig got called up, took the league by storm, and led the Los Angeles Dodgers on an historic road-winning streak and into the playoffs for the first time in four years. The problem—and the situation—in 2014 was that Mattingly, in spite of the fact Puig saved his job, had no gratitude for it. And the relationship between those two soured until it reached an even more sour point in the playoffs of that season when Puig was benched in Game 4 of the 2014 NLDS versus the St. Louis Cardinals in favor of that overpaid zooch Andre Ethier, in spite of the fact Puig scored four runs and had three cracks in the series’ first three altercations.

Then the following season where this supposed “decline” began, Molly Knight’s tardy book (I haven’t read it and never will) was published, and many who have liked to paint Puig’s character in a bad light since have pointed to that book and how “all of Puig’s teammates wanted to murder him.” Puig also spent his first time on the disabled list in 2015, missed more than half the clique’s duels and only got one start versus the New York Mets in the NLDS that year.

In 2016, Puig was finally free of Donnie Baseball, but the psychological aspect only worsened for him playing under new Dodgers pilot Dave Roberts. For instance, after Puig landed on the disabled list again that year with a strained hammy, Roberts and the Dodgers regiment added insult to buttonhole fracture by blaming Puig for suffering the bleeder. (And I don’t bring up these injuries and the Dodgers’ treatment of Puig for the purpose of veering this story off course into a list of excuses for Puig’s performance, but rather to point to the exact time in which Puig actually improved and gained next-level confidence as a stick wielder.)

About a month after returning from the hammy injury, Dodgers Prez Andrew Friedman and then-GM Farhan Zaidi replaced Puig by trading for feather duster Josh Reddick at the trade deadline and sending Puig to the Alfalfa league. This was, obviously, the low point for Puig as a baseballer, but the month or so Puig spent down in the sticks did wonders for him, as he was finally able to fix what was a flawed swing that had him, at times, looking kidnapped at the plate.

And now we get back to looking past the overall numberals and looking beneath the surface. Indians standouter first bagger Carlos Santana, who hit in the No. 3 spot in front of Puig on the Indians last season, helps depicture everything. Overall, you look at Santana’s figgers from last season, and he looks like a murderer: He made it to the All-Star Game for the first time in his career with a 4.5 WAR, while matching a career-high in Mark McGwires with 34; driving in a career-high 93 runs; scoring a career high in runs with a monstropolous 110; clubbing a career-high .281 and finishing the season with 100 or more free tickets for the fourth time in his career. But now let’s look at his September, because this was a key month for Puig as well.

After having lost the first two games of a three-game series with the Tampa Bay Rays, the Indians’ situation was that they were still just a half game behind the Rays for the second Wild Card spot in the American League at the start of September. The Indians also had just lost sticksmith third bagger Jose Ramirez for the rest of the year with a cracked hand. It was a grand loss for the Tribe, but not so monstropolous that it meant it was all over. The Indians were simply going to need the stick leaders in their lineup to step the fuck up.

Puig did; Santana and topnotcher Francisco Lindor didn’t.

Santana aka Mr. OBP hit just .219 in the season’s final month, with his 10 Annie Oaklies being by far his lowest output of any month on the season. Puig, on the other hand, hit .349 with eight duecers and 14 runs scored. The RBIs were his lowest of any month on the season with just 11, but this was 100 percent due to the head-liners in front of him rinky-dinking. Lindor wants $300 million or so, yet he has just a .269 OBP in September? He didn’t get the situation.

Puig did, bros.

On the season, Puig hit .331 with RISP. Of Puig’s 24 four-baggers, eight of them came with just a runner on first and three with just a runner on third. Clutch stats? .283 with RISP and two outs. (Just get on first station, Frankie!!!) No matter how much these analytics nerds want to point to an individual baseballer’s overall WAR, it doesn’t change the fact these baseballers, in order to win diamond tilts, need to cog together. All the focus after the season seems to be on Puig’s low round-tripper numberals, when it should be on the fact that the four-basers were most likely not there in the end because Puig was simply absent of the required situations for him to wham them. You understand this when you delve deeper into his figgers and place some sort of emphasis on how Santana and Lindor, when it mattered most, got the needle and flat-out choked. Puig was there, confident and focused, gearing up for what should have been his seventh-consecutive postseason, but was let down by a couple of drag-anchors.

So where is this supposed drop-off? Puig didn’t get a telephone number of free tickets on the year but showed improved patience by meandering to first at twice the rate with the Indians than he did with the Reds, as well as hitting two-basers at twice the rate. Again, the situations for him to hit those much-needed four-baggers did not present themselves when Puig finally got comfortable in a new league, in the month of September.

The nub is that it’s not unsafe to say Puig would have hit 35-plus back-breakers had he not been traded by Cincinnati at the deadline. Puig’s four-bagger per at-bat ratio of 17.0 with Cincinnati last year, for instance, was the highest of his career. The other two highest? The two prior seasons, which, as we’ve demonstrated here, was the point in time in which Puig fixed his swing and started to hit loopers consistently after working with hitting coach Turner Ward (who’s also somehow unemployed at the moment), who followed Puig to Cincinnati last year. And what’s more, Puig’s average four-bagger distance of 410 feet ranked him tied for 31st in all of baseball last year. In 2018, Puig’s 413-foot four-baser distance ranked him at No. 10 in all of baseball. The Mark McGwire distance in both of these last two seasons is evidence that Puig, while falling off in WAR due to his situation, has actually entered his prime as a home-runnist.

And the argument of, “But Puig hit only two loopers in Cleveland” is just tardy on a whole bunch of different levels, much like the argument that Puig has a southpaw jinx (Puig hit .279 against the wrong arm last season, actually platooned versus portsiders when he came back from the Alfalfa league in 2016 and those numberals in 2017 and 2018 were gunked up because of Roberts’ quick hook on Puig after a smitch sample size on the season, which is another example of the psychological aspect). One, because Puig was powdering the ball last year in Cincinnati. Two, because the stade in Cleveland has been one of the better stades for back-row hitters since its groundbreaking, so to even mention it as a factor in Puig not cracking four-baggers is absurd.

To even further emphasize the confident, clutch player Puig became after coming back from the bushes in 2016, just look at his postseason numbers in 2017 and 2018. All of his five postseason four-baggers came in those two postseasons. All of those magical moments Puig has had in the postseason, which include eight RBIs in the last two postseason series’ that he’s played in and eight runs scored and 10 RBIs during the 2017 postseason, have come during that time period.

All of this postseason success was set to culminate in Puig leading Cleveland to its first world’s serious title in like 70 years. His heroic performance there was supposed to result in a he-man-sized, well-deserved payday, but Santana (who’s already gotten his jumbo contract) and Lindor (who didn’t even need to do his chores in September in order to get his) didn’t stick it out, which fucked Puig over。