Former Los Angeles Dodgers star Yasiel Puig has found a new team.
Puig, 35, signed with a baseball team in Toronto, though it’s not the Blue Jays.
Instead, he’s agreed to play for the Toronto Maple Leafs, a semi-pro baseball team that shares a name with the hockey franchise, as reported by Darnell Mayberry of The Athletic, who cited the Toronto Star as breaking the news.
It’s probably something many never thought possible for a former MLB All-Star, but Puig hasn’t played in the majors since 2019.
Before that final year, though, he’d had some bright moments for the Dodgers.
Puig appeared in more than 700 games in six seasons for the Boys in Blue. He recorded a .277 batting-average with 636 hits, including 108 home runs, and was named an All-Star in 2014, his second season.
After that stint, he split 2019 between the Cincinnati Reds and Cleveland Indians, now known as the Guardians.
He’s expressed some interest in rejoining the Dodgers, where he spent six of his seven seasons, and retiring with the team, but that hasn’t panned out.
“Yes, I want to be with Los Angeles again one more time,” Puig told Dodgers Nation’s Doug McKain. “I love the city, I love the fans, this is a great place to be, and I do my little career here in Los Angeles. I love the stadium, I love everything that comes with the Dodgers like great fans, great city, [I have been with] a lot of different teams and I want to live that part of my life again.”
Instead, Puig was convicted earlier this year of lying to federal investigators about his betting on sports while still playing baseball in 2019.
The U.S. Department of Justice claimed Puig lied to them about that gambling, including in a 2022 interview, and he was convicted of obstruction of justice.
As Mayberry noted, the Maple Leafs are expecting Puig to be in their Opening Day lineup on May 10.
That’s just over two weeks before his sentencing in Los Angeles on May 26.
It’s possible that his stint as a Maple Leaf will be very short-lived, but prosecutors haven’t said what kind of sentence they’re hoping to get for Puig.
There’s even a chance he doesn’t serve any sort of prison sentence at all, so maybe the Maple Leafs either know something the public doesn’t, or maybe they’re gambling that however long they have Puig is worth the uncertainty.