Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 428: Jesse Katz on Yasiel Puig’s Origin Story

Episode Date: April 15, 2014

Ben and Jason talk to Jesse Katz about his reporting on Yasiel Puig’s harrowing escape from Cuba.

And a high fly ball into deep left center, Havana, Cuba has arrived, and we have a 5-5 tie. And the fly ball to deep right blanks to the track, it is gone! He has hit another one! Que viva Cuba! Viva Puig! And it's 8-6 Dodgers, can you believe it? Good morning and welcome to episode 428 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives presented by the BaseballReference.com Play Index. I am Ben Lindberg. Sam Miller is on vacation, so I am joined today by Jason Wojciechowski, who has filled in for Sam before. Hello, Jason. I thought I was going to be Sam. Yes, you were. I thought we agreed on that.

You can role play if you'd like. guest today, Jesse Katz, who is a longtime journalist, reporter, spent many years at the Los Angeles Times and is a contributing writer at Los Angeles Magazine, where he wrote a really in-depth feature for the May issue that you can read online now about Yasiel Puig and Puig's escape from Cuba, his journey from Cuba to the United States via Mexico and a lot of the shady aspects of that journey and a little bit about Puig himself. So it's a really interesting story. It's a bit more in-depth than your typical hot take on Puig being late for a game and not being in the lineup.

So thanks for joining us, Jesse. Hey, it's a great pleasure, Ben and Jason. So for people who don't know, can you give a little bit of background on how exactly a player gets from Cuba to the United States and the arcane rules and laws and lack of laws governing that process? Sure. One of the problems is that there is no legitimate way, there is no humanitarian boat lift taking players like Yossi El Pouy and delivering them to the major leagues. It really requires a series of kind of extraordinary that, you know, anytime you have a people that are prohibited from crossing their own borders, it's troubling. And Yasiel had to make multiple attempts to get out of Cuba. I was able to document five of them.

There may be more. But he finally succeeded. And, you know, you don't just do it on your own. You don't just hop in a rowboat and head for Florida. You're putting your life on the line. And, you know, you're hoping that there's millions of dollars waiting for you at the end of that journey. You need smugglers. You need smugglers to get yourself off the island of Cuba.

And ultimately what those smugglers do is they don't take you to the United States, where a Cuban would be welcomed quite readily as a political asylee, but you would also be considered an amateur in baseball terms and would be thrown into the draft and find yourself at the mercy of whatever team happened to draft you. And so what Cuban players need to do is declare themselves free agents before they come to America. And the problem is you can't be a free agent in Cuba. As a Cuban playing for a Cuban league, not only does the Cuban government prohibit it, but the U.S. government does. You can't pay money to a Cuban citizen legitimately.

So Yasiel did what many other Cuban ballplayers have done to arrive at the big leagues, and that is go to a third country. Sometimes it's the Dominican Republic or Haiti. In his case, it was Mexico. So he had these smugglers deliver him to Isla Mujeres off the coast of Cancun. And that's where the story starts to get, you know, very, very dark and menacing. Right. And you point out in the piece that maybe it's sort of surprising that more Cuban players don't try to make this trip given what's at stake or given what they stand to make. And you mentioned that Puig was making $17 a month playing in Cuba, and he's, of course, making quite a bit more than that now. So the incentive is certainly there, but there seems to be no reliable method.

There's no method that's not fraught with danger, and Puig certainly faced some of that in his own trip. before this is, you know, we think of these big forces in the world, political forces, ideological forces, economic, criminal, whatever it may be, but they're kind of abstractions. And when they collide, you know, they don't collide in abstract ways. They really affect regular folks down at the street level. And it's hard to remember that a little less than two years ago, Yasiel Puig was still just a regular guy, a more or less unknown Cuban prospect just trying to get off the island. But when you have that collision, it puts people in kind of impossible situations.

So Yasiel, like other Cuban ballplayers who have made this journey, you know, was forced to take some risks and make some compromises and rub shoulders with some really unsavory characters in order to make this journey. And, you know, you can sort of, you know, look askance at that. And at the same time, it's completely understandable. I think if you or I or any of us had even a fraction of the talent that somebody like Yossi El Puig has, and we were making the alternative with $17 a month, we'd probably be getting on that boat too. And a lot of listeners will recall the story from last year in New York Mag by Steve Fishman about A-Rod and sort of all the unsavory characters that were involved in his life. And that story now seems pretty tame compared to the people Puig was involved with. And so you have to essentially find a backer, it seems, to pay

off the smugglers to take you on this trip. And the one who was backing Puig did not come through once Puig arrived in Mexico. And so that put him in a very dangerous situation, it seems like. Yeah. Well, a few things about the backer who ultimately became backers. But the guy who sent the message to Yasiel was a dude in Miami named Raul Pacheco. And he, you know, is best described as a small-time crook. He was on probation at the time for attempted burglary and possession of a fake Florida ID. And he was an air conditioning repairman, and he had a recycling business, a metal business. And it's sort of hard to think that somebody like that would be able to deliver the most

attractive offer to Yasiel to get off the island. But apparently it was, or maybe other offers had fallen through and he was desperate. And Raul Pacheco's offer was he would put up $250,000 to pay the smugglers that would get Yaciel off the island. And in return, once Yaciel was in Mexico and was a free agent and could audition for pro scouts and sign a contract, that he would then owe Raul Pacheco 20% of all future earnings. From our perspective, that just sounds kind of insane and usurious. you would never recommend that to a friend or a client. But if you're a kid in Cuba and again, looking at the alternatives, it probably sounded pretty good.

And so when Pachico did not pay up, essentially Puig was more or less held hostage by these smugglers and was threatened. What I couldn't tell was, at that point, do you think, Puig was more or less held hostage by these smugglers and was threatened. What I couldn't tell was, you know, at that point, do you think that Puig was in serious danger given that, you know, he's essentially a lottery ticket for whoever is holding him at that point? The smugglers eventually decided to auction him off. So it seems like, you know, they really would have been hurting themselves by hurting him. Yeah, well, Pacheco seemingly did not have the $250,000 that he had pledged. There's some contradictory information in the record. It may be that he put up some of it or all of it, and then the smugglers decided, oh, well, Puig's worth this much more. And they tried to extort more money out of Pacheco. But the more likely thing from what

I've been able to glean is that he probably didn't have $250,000. So for whatever reason, the smugglers weren't getting the money that they thought they were entitled to. And this went on for a number of days. And eventually those days turned into weeks. And at 20 some odd days, you know, the smugglers were, you know, this was not a game. And they were making what seemed to be real threats and talk of violence and were mentioning that, you know, at any any moment they could take a machete out and lop off an arm or a hand or a finger and Yasiel would never play baseball again for anyone. And I don't know, was that likely to happen? I interviewed a guy who was on the boat with Yasiel, who was in that motel room with Yasiel. And I asked him just

that, did you, did you really think these threats were real? And, uh, you know, his answer to me was who the hell knows? Uh, I mean, you can't really say, but we, we had to assume they were real. Um, they could have been real. And I guess that's what I have in the back of my mind. I don't think there were guys walking around swinging machetes at any point. But you can imagine some strung out smuggler on the Yucatan who has had one shot too many of tequila and snorted a line or two too many of the wrong thing. And all of a sudden he loses his cool and and gets frustrated and you know doesn't give a damn about yasiel or or baseball so i'm i'm sort of curious about um i don't know you uh you know what what um like why why yasiel puig you know obviously everybody

you know there's been a million stories um, you know, still there was a lot of mystery, of course. You know, you answered questions that had not been answered before. But was there something more than just, you know, this is a mystery that somebody should solve? You know, was there anything in particular about Puig that was, you know, really made you want to go after this? Or what was your motivation, Jesse? I guess is what I'm trying to ask here. That's a very pointed question. You know, first of all, I should say I approach a story like this kind of as a Dodger fan.

I should say I approach a story like this kind of as a Dodger fan. You know, I have 16 years in a row that I've gone to opening day here at Dodger Stadium. And, you know, it's almost like my national day of observance or something. And, you know, my mom came to America on a boat from war-torn Europe during World War II and landed in New York and was a Dodger fan as a little girl and actually felt like she was becoming American by listening to the Brooklyn Dodgers on the radio. So maybe there's some of that in my DNA where I was just sort of drawn to this team and what it means and what it represents. And, you know, was thrilled when Yasiel showed up in the middle of last season. I mean, the Dodgers were this incredible disappointment, you know, a $200 million plus payroll.

And they were in last place. And they just seemed like listless and passionless and underachieving and just looked the team by storm and takes the city by storm. And in some ways, you know, took all of, all of major league baseball by storm. And it was just, it was thrilling, you know, I mean, he's, he plays in this kind of fearless, joyful, exuberant level. That's also kind of confounding and headatching. And I don't know, I just think that we're, at least speaking, I know not everybody in every city in America shares this perspective, but I think as somebody who lives in LA, I mean, I'm incredibly lucky that I have somebody like Yassiel Puig to cheer for and, you know, groan about. So, um, I was fascinated by him and, and I felt, you know,

I guess, you know, your instinct tells you, well, I didn't, it didn't require that much instinct, but it was clear that we, we didn't know the whole story about him. It was clear that, that there was something enigmatic about him, something, things that he wasn't revealing. And of course there were some rumors and hints. If you go back and read the old stories and a few blog posts, I mean, there really were references to smugglers and kidnappings. But nobody really went there. Nobody wanted, I don't know, maybe somebody wanted to know, but nobody maybe wanted to upset the Dodgers or upset Puig or kind of lose their access to that community in the locker room or on the playing field. And maybe as a non-sports reporter, I felt that I would have a little bit more latitude to follow the story wherever it went.

I felt that I would have a little bit more latitude to follow the story wherever it went. The other sort of reporting question that I'm kind of interested in, and it's, I don't know, it's the salacious question. These sort of underworld kind of stories are not new to you. You've certainly done more than your share of reporting from those kinds of worlds. Did you, I mean, were there moments in this where you were in places where you were nervous? Were there people that kind of maybe you weren't entirely comfortable with? Anything like that during this story? I mean, it's, you know, you talked about the sort of shadiness of the characters, and you've got these smugglers around, and, you know, I don't

know how much contact you sort of had to have directly with that world in reporting this, but was that part of the experience here? Well, you know, I didn't, Well, I didn't have that much contact directly with the people in the smuggling world. But probably the moments that felt diciest to me were when I was in Cuba. It's funny. I went to Cuba once before about a dozen years ago as a tourist. I went to Cuba once before, about a dozen years ago, as a tourist. So at that point, Cuba was happy to have me, but I was not in compliance with U.S. laws at that particular time. On this trip, it was the reverse. I was completely honoring U.S. laws because as a journalist, I qualify for a general license, which allows me to go to Cuba to report a story.

But the Cuban authorities aren't too thrilled about having journalists just parachute in. So I went in as a tourist. I didn't have a press visa. So I was kind of having to be discreet about who I was and what I was doing there. And that was okay a lot of the times because I just wanted to soak it up. I did want to be a tourist and just get the sights and sounds and smells and try to absorb where Yasiel grew up

and where he came from. But there were moments such as when I made an incursion into the little village that Yasiel is from. It's a town of like 3,000 people, a factory town, where there's a sugar cane factory, and that's the entire town. And there's a baseball field, this kind of scorched earth, tattered, broken down, bases made out of swaths of old flower bags. And it was right out of some movie about the dire conditions of kids playing baseball in

the Caribbean. And I knocked on the door of his house. I went to the place that Yasiel lived and, um, I said the truth. I said that I was from Los Angeles and I was a huge baseball fan and, um, I love the Dodgers and we allossi El Puig in Los Angeles, and I wanted to see where he was from. And, you know, it wasn't the entire truth, but it was true. And, you know, I didn't want to, you know, there was somebody living in the house. I don't want to embarrass that person. I didn't quote that person.

But I just wanted to see. I wanted to see where he lived. I wanted to know where he came from. But it did occur to me that if that person was suspicious or if that person had decided to call Yasiel at that moment, they could have called the police or every block in Cuba has a branch of the CDR, the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution, which are kind of the neighborhood's informants, really. And, you know, I could have easily been escorted off that island if anybody grew too suspicious. So this kind of, you know, I will say posing as a Dodger fan, which was an authentic identity, but feeling like, you know like if anyone pressed me too much,

I could be in real trouble. I was very conscious of the clock ticking on me and needing to see some things, absorb them, and then get the hell out. I imagine that some of the writers who have been frustrated by Puig and his behavior, I suppose off the field thus far in his career, would maybe feel vindicated or gratified

by your description of Puig earlier in his career. I mean, Puig at 18 was certainly no more mature than Puig at 23. And it sounds like, you know, you described, you talked to teammates or people who played with him or people who covered him and it sounds like the issues that he's had with the Dodgers now were something that he had really from the start, but that maybe at least initially those failings were sort of winked at

a little more than they have been here, or at least accepted more, you know, there has, there wasn't so much of a righteous, you know, this is not how the game is played response to, to Puig early on. Everywhere I went in Cuba, and asked, you know, mentioned Yasiel's name, the word you would hear over and over again was loco. He'd be, you know, medio loco, un poco loco, cabeza loca, whatever it was. He was just always half crazy, a little bit crazy. People said it with a little bit of the shake of the head, but also kind of admiringly at the same time. There was an appreciation for this kind of carefree enthusiasm, slightly reckless quality. And so, you know, maybe that was tolerated in a way, although, you know, Puig had a lot of trouble with his coaches there. And, you know, his ability to kind of stay off the bench or stay out of the doghouse.

And in some ways that hasn't changed so much either. But, you know, he had a rookie year when he was 18 playing for the Cienfuegos Elefantes. And he did okay. He batted like 270-something. And, you know, it was fair enough. He was young, but it was not stellar. And, you know, this is a team, by the way, that Jose Abreu was on,

and one of the really legitimate feared sluggers of the Cuban League. So there were already stars, big stars. And then his second year, he comes back, and the reports were that Puig had been injured, and so he didn't really play. were that Puig had been injured and so he didn't really play. But I found a lot of evidence suggesting that he had pissed off his coaches and was missing in action late for practice or didn't show up for training sessions or whatever. And I found a quote from him on a Cuban blog where he said he missed the season for behaving good in practice.

So I think being a little bit sly and facetious. And then he comes back his third year and has his best year ever in Cuba. And that earns him the ability to travel to international tournaments and whatnot. And he comes back from that and he's suspended again. And he's kind of on the team, then off the team. And it's clear that at that point, his defection attempts have begun. But you look back at it and, you know, he really didn't hardly play in Cuba at all. He had one good season. He played two out of the four seasons that he was with Cienfuegos.

So he was really, in so many ways, untested and did not have those years of experience that maybe somebody coming through our high school and college system here would have had. somebody coming through our high school and college system here would have had. And you talk about the very difficult line that an aspiring defector has to walk in Cuba, where you write that Puig wanted to appear as if he were a loyal and trustworthy Cuban citizen, even as he plotted his own escape. And so as part of this effort, some of these players or people who are thinking about defecting have to be willing to turn on the people who maybe are helping them

do this to protect themselves. And so it's sort of tough to figure out how to regard Puig's role in this. You know, is it snitching? Is it just, is it self-preservation? You say that a more charitable view of Puig conveys the pressure he lived under. You know, if you can go to jail because this offer is not legitimate and someone will turn you in, then of course you have to be willing to turn them in

if it's them or you. So how do you think about his actions in this situation? Well, you're absolutely right. It is hard to know what to think of it and what to make of it. I feel like Cuba is a beautiful country with lovely people, and're they're placed in this you know enormously difficult situation so you got to start from that premise that you're in a country where suggesting to somebody else hey it would be great if you left the country uh that's a crime and uh you know that's just sort of hard thing to wrap your brain around if you're from the United States.

There is, yeah, there's constant pressure on these guys to leave. They're being solicited all the time from, you know, messengers and couriers and bag men and touts. And they all, you know, are trying to say, hey, let's get out, get out of the country. I'll help you. I will do it. And at the same time, you have these secret police and paying informants and all sorts of eyes on you monitoring your every move. And the allegations in this court case that is still pending in Miami

are that Puig turned people in, that there's a dude in a Cuban prison who got seven years in prison because Puig and his mother testified against him, said that this guy, you know, tried to offer Puig a trip out of the country. And Puig did testify. And that's, you know, that's kind of troubling. And the lawsuit paints him as an opportunist, paints him as a snitch and a backstabber. And it's easy to say that that's less than honorable behavior.

At the same time, I'm not sure how much choice Puig really had. He was being told you have to testify. And I tried to put myself in his shoes, you know, on, on one hand you could come away thinking like this guy's kind of ruthless and just in it for himself. And at the same time I'm thinking, what if he really just wants to get out and he doesn't know how to get out and he doesn't know who to trust and he's being bombarded with offers, and you're going to put your life in somebody's hands, and you've got to count on them to deliver you to your destination. And who do you trust, and when and where do you talk about it,

and how do you know it's going to turn out okay without it kind of blowing up in your face and you end up in jail yourself. And so I don't know that he handled it great, but I also don't think that he was put in a very ideal situation. I'm glad you mentioned the lawsuit, actually, because that's kind of where we wanted to go a little bit, particularly this boxer whose name I'm going to ask you to pronounce because we don't have any idea how to say his last name. Yeah, well, Junior, Junior, but we could call him Junior,

Despinier. So it sounds vaguely French, I guess. So it sounds vaguely French, I guess. So he's kind of an interesting character in this story. I mean, Puig is not the only person with a lot of mixed motives and a lot of mystery in his background and a lot of, I don't know. I mean, you went to his house. What did you make of this guy? Yeah, well, Junior is a, you know, he is a key figure in this whole story. He was a boxer on the Cuban national team. And he was suspended from the boxing team because he was considered a flight risk. because he was considered a flight risk. And so he was kind of out of sorts and didn't have a future in Cuba anymore. And he happened to know our air conditioning recycler probationer in Miami, Raul Pacheco.

And so Raul Pacheco called Junior. That's how the message got passed to Yasiel and how the deal got put together, um, from my understanding. And, uh, and so Junior got a free ride on the boat with Yasiel, uh, but also endured a lot of what, uh, you know, endured not only the captivity in, in Mexico, but after it all ended and they were all in the United States and the smugglers went looking to recoup their money, they felt they had gotten stiff. It was Junior that they tracked down and Junior that they threatened and they called his mom and threatened her. And so he kind of

endured the crappy end of this, you know, the messy aftermath. And I'm not sure that Junior felt that Yasiel really handled things as best as he could or took care of business or looked out for Junior. And so Junior has become a witness in this lawsuit and submitted an affidavit back in December that kind of lays out almost every single step of the story from the various defection attempts in Cuba to the month of captivity in Mexico to all the financial arrangements and the names of the smugglers and the names of the financiers in Miami. And he kind of lays it all out there. And what's his motive? You know, he's not a plaintiff. He's a witness. So he doesn't really have anything invested in the outcome of the lawsuit. But, you know, he's clearly trying to

undermine Yasiel in some ways and lend credibility to this guy who ended up in prison. And, you know, my sense is that, you know, he, if you want to give him the most charitable interpretation, you know, he feels that, that people, people got ground up, you know, he's tired of this. He's tired of seeing his people become collateral damage for these kind of journeys. He's speaking up. I'm sure Yasiel and his people view Junior as a hanger-on who's trying to milk him for money. Does what was going on in the background make Puig's rookie season performance any more impressive to you? after he kind of cashed in on his talent and one of them turned up dead under mysterious circumstances and there's all this, you know, threats flying around and, you know, it kind of contextualizing his, his incredible spring last year. And then his, his breakout performance in the majors. I mean,

that has to be more of a distraction or a concern than, than most players have to have to deal with. Yeah, knowing that you owe 20% of your salary to the Mafioso dudes in Miami and meanwhile have some smugglers who are in cahoots with the Zeta drug cartel thinking that you stiffed them. Those are some distractions, but the best athletes seem to be able to compartmentalize that and leave the chatter and the distractions aside. And I don't know.

He loves to play baseball. That much is clear. And I suspect that when he's on the baseball field, all that stuff ends. And maybe that's his one safe place. Before we wrap up, I'm just curious, you know, having reported and written this piece, how it has affected your perception of Puig. You know, a lot of the response to your story, I think, has been, we need to give this guy a break. Look what he has gone through. You know, anyone having

faced death and faced threats and having gone to extreme lengths to get themselves here, maybe, you know, we should cut him some slack for being late to a game now and then. Is that, you know, is that a fair response to this, do you think? Do you think that, you know, has your reporting in a sense confirmed that this has kind of always been the way Puig was even before he made that journey? And so, you know, does this, I guess, make Puig a more sympathetic character to you or less? That's a really good question. I have been heartened by the fact that the response generally seems to be both very generous towards the story. People are quite taken by it, which makes me happy. But they also interpret it in a way that is generous towards Yasiel. You're right. they also interpret it in a way that is generous towards Yasiel.

You're right. I kind of thought that because the details are so dark at times and the implications of the story are so unsettling that maybe the haters out there would use it to condemn Yasiel in some ways or, I don't know, or they would hate the story as a result if they were defenders of Yassiel. And it just doesn't seem to have panned out that way. People are intrigued by what he had to go through and respond to it in some kind of positive way. And look, I mean, Los Angeles is, you know, we're a city of immigrants. We're kind of a city of Yossi El Puig. You know, there are not too many parts of Los Angeles where you go and, you know, there isn't somebody that's had some version of that journey.

You know, maybe it was on land and not on water. And maybe there wasn't a $42 million contract waiting for them upon their arrival. dollar contract waiting for them upon their arrival. But man, you know, millions of people have risked their lives to get across the border and get out of their homeland to be part of what LA is. So I feel like that's kind of, you know, maybe it's not articulated, but I feel like that's kind of permeating the discussion in some ways. Well, thank you for bringing this story to light and also for discussing it with us. People should definitely check it out, either in the May issue of LA Magazine or right now online.

We will link to it in the podcast post at Baseball Perspectives and also in the Facebook group. And you can go to buyjessicats.com to read more about Jesse and dig up some of his other work. So thanks for joining us, Jesse. Thank you. It's been a pleasure. And we will be back tomorrow. Please send us emails at podcast at baseballperspectives.com.

We will get to those. And please support our sponsor, the baseballReference.com Play Index. Go to BaseballReference.com, use the coupon code BP when you sign up for the Play Index to get the discounted price of $30 on a one-year subscription. We will be back tomorrow.