Good morning and welcome to episode 167 of Effectively Wild, the Daily Podcast from

Spaceball Prospectus. I am Ben Lindbergh, joining me is Sam Miller, hello Sam. Hi Ben.

So we were just discussing what to talk about. We are sort of still in the process of discussing

what to talk about. I was just reading Buster Only's post from yesterday, after listening

this on Tuesday, on Yassiel Puig. We agreed that that is how we would pronounce his name,

although it is not necessarily how his name is pronounced. And Buster wrote about how Puig is

forcing the Dodgers' hand, that is the title of his blog post. And I wanted to talk a little bit

about whether we think that is actually true, whether we think that the Dodgers are under any sort

of pressure to do anything that they wouldn't have done with Puig before this spring. And then I

also wanted to talk a little bit about the reaction when Puig was signed, which I think we may have

talked about in the early days of the podcast, or at least at some point we mentioned it when we

were maybe talking to Mike Petriello about the crazy spending Dodgers and how they were spending

responsibly and spending way more money than they needed to be spending. Yeah, to be crystal clear,

I think I'm almost certain that we've both used that as an example of how down the Dodgers are.

I'm pretty sure we did. And when we did that, we were just kind of picking up on what other people

who we read and trust were saying, because we had not seen the player ourselves. And I guess

that is kind of the problem, or it was kind of the problem that most people had not seen the player.

And so there was this tendency to write it off as just the Dodgers going crazy with all this

newfound money and just wanting to spend it somewhere and just finding someone who is available

and spending it all on him, even if he wasn't necessarily worth it. So I was just reading Keith

Law's post when the Dodgers signed Puig that the headline was Dodgers Go Overboard for Yasiel Puig

that is June 28th, 2012. And he said, based on what I've heard about Puig, this is a bizarre

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