Lies, Damn Lies, and Yasiel Puig’s Age

I get a lot of questions on this blog.

Why are you still writing this crap?
Do bears eat beets?
Who is Doug Slaten?

…and of course – how do I baseball?

I do my best to answer these questions, mostly through nefarious statistical means, thanks to the likes of Baseball Reference, Fangraphs, and Baseball Prospectus. Yet, every so often, I get a question that goes beyond the abilities of those fantastic websites, and I am required to fall back on my education in science and medicine to get to the root of the matter, and provide my dear readers the answer they desire when they ~~google their question and inadvertently happen upon this~~ ~~blog~~ ask me the tough questions.

The biggest question I’ve been getting thus far? One that haunts many a player from the Caribbean – how old REALLY is <name here>?

While you can find many instances of players from the Dominican and parts elsewhere to the south of the United States fibbing and whittling off a couple of years off of their actual age in an effort to be more attractive a prospect, in the hopes of getting a bigger signing bonus, one country does occasionally provide us their top-notch talent, along with some additional mystery shrouding the actualities of their biological age due to their political perspectives and the concomitant shrouding of their borders – Cuba.

The latest Cuban to wow the MLB? Yasiel Puig. The latest player to show up in my search history, due to people asking what his actual age was?

Yasiel Puig.

I’m a man of connections and curiosity; I shall use those powers of evil for good, and, with a little help from some medical expert friends of mine, answer this question.

HOW OLD IS YASIEL PUIG? NO REALLY, HOW OLD?

Ready? Let’s get some basics out of the way first…

Looks good so far…

Puig is a beast, but could stand to know how to ease those aches and pains, post outfield wall collisions. Let’s get him informed, yes?

Moving on…

Floss? How often does he floss? Secondhand smoke exposure? Besides the flossing and smoking he does to NL West pitching?

Obviously the likes of Brandon League and Ted Lilly rely upon Puig to do something for them daily, like bring back homers and lay waste to opponent’s pitching. Hard work. We should list that…

He defected from Cuba then made a bazillion dollars, so points for that. He also had to live in Tennessee, so more points for that hardship… OK, looking good…