San Francisco Giants: Could Puig Be Next to Leave NL West?

The big news in the MLB this week was the Arizona Diamondbacks trading first baseman Paul Goldschmidt to the St. Louis Cardinals. The news came as a relief for San Francisco Giants fans as Goldschmidt absolutely owned the Giants during his time in Arizona. Now could Yasiel Puig be on his way out?

With one notorious killer of the San Francisco Giants out of the NL West for the foreseeable future, could we see another domino in the Giants killer ilk fall?

Yasiel Puig has had his name floated by some analysts who believe he could be traded this offseason. Dylan Hernandez of the Los Angeles Times reports that Puig is “disgruntled” with limited playing time and is open to being traded.

This is far from a sure thing, but it would be, for me at least, bittersweet to see Puig go. We all know that Puig has a tendency to perform well against the Giants, but his presence would be missed in the bitter rivalry.

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Puig has got to be public enemy number one when it comes to players Giants fans like the least. This is reflected in the raucous boos that rain down upon him every time he steps up to the plate at AT&T Park.

His at-bats against Madison Bumgarner are always entertaining. Even if he innocently flies out to center field, if he licked his bat in just the wrong way before stepping into the box, Bumgarner will make him and everyone in the stadium aware of this perceived showmanship.

There have been rumors surrounding Puig’s imminent trading for a few years now. When he was struggling so badly that he was sent down to the minor leagues there were calls for him to be traded then as well.

So the moral of the story is that we shouldn’t get our hopes up. Even if the Dodgers do decide to trade Puig, they’re so deep and so adept at developing players that they could probably take some Joe Schmo off the street and get 20 home runs and a batting average over .280 out of him.

Puig has been a pretty huge part of the modern carnation of the Giants-Dodgers rivalry and while my heart would not exactly break if he were to go, there is no doubt that the rivalry wouldn’t quite be the same.