Richard Mackson-USA TODAY Sports
Although it isn’t nearly as sexy as the NFL or even the NBA, the powers that be in MLB must be doing jumping-jacks over the recent plethora of young stars. As if Mike Trout, Bryce Harper and Manny Machado weren’t impressive enough, now the league has another budding star and he’s set to be a Los Angeles Dodgers mainstay.
Yasiel Puig is the newest craze across baseball and rightfully so as the Cuban outfielder has smashed three home runs and driven in nine runs in just 16 plate appearances. Los Angeles was in desperate need of a spark and since being called up Puig has led the Dodgers to a sparkling 3-1 record — it will take more than four good games to get the Dodgers out of the last-place hole that they have dug themselves.
Moving on, the Puig excellence would be even more spectacular if the aforementioned play-makers weren’t producing at such a high clip. When Trout and Harper took the league by storm in 2012 it was unprecedented, but now that those two are seemingly superstars, the Puig streak seems merely par for the course.
However, the good thing about having so many great younger players like Machado and the like is that the game can now hit a demographic that they’ve been whiffing on for quite some time. Teenage boys would much rather follow the hard-hitting NFL or the NBA where swagger is alive and well, than watch a boring ole baseball game.
The future of the sport rests on the shoulders of these young men, which isn’t a bad thing considering the leaders that MLB had prior — something tells me Harper is more likable than say…Alex Rodriguez.
