Roberts: Puig to 'start fresh' with Dodgers in 2016

Dave Roberts, who was hired in November to replace Don Mattingly as manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, doesn't care what Yasiel Puig has or hasn't done in the past. He made that clear to the polarizing outfielder on Saturday, when the two found a moment to chat at the club's annual FanFest.

"For me, it's more of 'let's wipe the slate clean and let's start anew,'" Roberts told Andy McCullough of the Los Angeles Times. "There's the same core of players, but there's a completely different coaching staff. And we just want him to be himself. So let's start fresh."

Puig's tenure with the Dodgers has ranged from brilliant to exasperating to potentially disastrous since his 2013 debut, though his contentious relationship with some of his teammates became a major story last summer in what was easily the worst season of his young career.

In June, one anonymous Dodgers player told Yahoo's Jeff Passan that getting rid of the talented Cuban "would be addition by subtraction." Andy Van Slyke - whose son, Scott, is one of the Dodgers' outfielders - said earlier this offseason that the club's highest-paid player told top executive Andrew Friedman, "The first thing you need to do is get rid of Puig."

Friedman denied having any such conversation with Clayton Kershaw - the three-time Cy Young award winner implicated by the senior Van Slyke - and Puig noted Saturday that he cleared the air with his team's ace during their recent goodwill trip to Cuba.

"Now that we're going to go out to spring training, going to catch up with him there, have a little bit more of a discussion," Puig said through an interpreter. "Just to make sure that we're all on the same page, that we're all working together as a team, that we're all focused on getting to the World Series this year."

A bounce-back season from Puig would certainly help. After tormenting the National League for the first two seasons of his MLB career, the 25-year-old stumbled in 2015, posting career-lows in virtually every meaningful statistic while missing more than half the season with various injuries.

His work this offseason, however, has Friedman encouraged as spring training looms.

"He looks great," Friedman said. "He's worked extremely hard, both in Miami and in L.A. It was never a weight issue, in the classic sense. It was more about just how big and just how strong he had gotten."