Is Dodgers' Dominance Without Superstar Yasiel Puig Sustainable?

The Los Angeles Dodgers have won five in a row, 11 out of 14 and 22 out of 32 overall, giving them the second-best record in Major League Baseball. In the parlance of our times, they're so hot right now.

But they've been doing it all without arguably their best player. And now, the word is that they'll have to continue doing so for a while longer. 

We're talking about 24-year-old right fielder Yasiel Puig, who led all Dodgers position players in Wins Above Replacement in 2013 and 2014. He's been on the shelf since late April with a strained left hamstring and is going to stay there for a while after aggravating the injury last Friday.

Steve Dilbeck of the Los Angeles Times wrote that "rebooting" Puig's rehab process may be the only way for the Dodgers to go now. Manager Don Mattingly didn't want to go that far, but he didn't sound overly optimistic either.

"I don't know about it starting all the way over," the Dodgers skipper told Ken Gurnick of MLB.com. "It wasn't necessarily good news, but I don't feel we're starting all the way over. The MRI shows a strain and we know there is one."

If the Dodgers have to start from scratch with Puig's rehab, that would put him at least a couple weeks away from returning. Even if they don't, the volatile nature of hamstring injuries—Puig's own injury can vouch for that—makes it likely he's at least a couple weeks from returning either way.

Given that Puig was following up his excellent seasons in '13 and '14 with a .279/.380/.465 and two home runs in his first 11 games of 2015, one wants to say this is a blow.

But in light of how the Dodgers are playing without Puig, we can instead ask: Shoot, just how much of a blow is this?

Denis Poroy/Getty Images

The one place you'd expect the Dodgers to be missing Puig most is on offense. After all, they did come into 2015 with looming offensive question marks after the offseason departures of Matt Kemp, Hanley Ramirez and Dee Gordon.

Instead, the Dodgers offense hasn't needed Puig to put all other offenses in MLB to shame.

Entering play on Wednesday, the Dodgers offense ranks as elite in all the important categories. Their 5.31 runs per game is tops in the National League, and they lead MLB in on-base percentage (.354), slugging percentage (.488), OPS (.842) and home runs (51).

The Dodgers offense has been so good, in fact, that comparing it to other 2015 offenses doesn't do it justice. As Ted Berg of USA Today noted, you have to go back a bit further to find a fair comp:

Berg noted at the time that the Dodgers' collective OPS+ (that's a park- and league-adjusted version of OPS) of 128 put them on pace to best the 1927 Yankees' all-time record of 127. In the days since, the Dodgers' OPS+ has risen to 132.

In so many words, the Dodgers offense has been impossibly good in 2015. And in light of Puig's injury, the worry now is whether the operative word in that sentence is "impossibly."

It's not so much that the Dodgers offense has been enjoying too much good luck. Per FanGraphs, they have the majors' fourth-best walk-to-strikeout ratio. And while their .307 batting average on balls in play (BABIP) is indeed high, it's not absurdly high. Lastly, their power production is backed up by MLB's fourth-best hard-hit rate and, per Fangraphs, second-best average batted ball velocity.

Rather, the real question is if the Dodgers offense simply has too many guys who are playing way over their heads. To this end, no doubt some of you are saying, "Gee, ya think?!"

Yup, things sure look that way. Narrow things down to the Dodgers who have gotten at least 50 plate appearances and use OPS+ as a measuring stick, you get a picture that looks like this:

Player	G	PA	OPS+
Adrian Gonzalez	32	136	214
Jimmy Rollins	31	136	54
Howie Kendrick	31	132	140
Joc Pederson	32	129	177
Yasmani Grandal	26	99	162
Andre Ethier	29	97	181
Juan Uribe	23	75	73
Justin Turner	25	61	181
Scott Van Slyke	21	58	181
Alex Guerrero	22	56	218
Carl Crawford*	15	50	83
Yasiel Puig*	11	50	134

*Currently on the DL.

Since an OPS+ of 100 is average, I've highlighted the Dodgers hitters who have been below average. That collection contains only three players, one of which (Carl Crawford) is also on the disabled list. To boot, none of the guys on the flip-side has been even close to average. The lowest OPS+ of the bunch is Puig's 134. The other eight are over 140.

For perspective, that's twice as many 140 OPS+ hitters as any other team has this season. For further perspective, it's two more 140 OPS+ hitters than any other team in history has ever had. 

In fairness, the Dodgers do have quite a few good hitters. Adrian Gonzalez and Howie Kendrick have been good for years. Joc Pederson is making good on the hype he had as a top prospect. Yasmani Grandal was underrated in San Diego. Justin Turner is fresh off an outstanding 2014 season.

But even they've been a bit too good early on, and then there are the other guys. Andre Ethier's current OPS+ is 84 points higher than his 2014 OPS+. Scott Van Slyke can't keep his BABIP near .400 forever. Talented though he may be, Alex Guerrero won't keep hitting 35 percent of his fly balls over the wall.

If one didn't know any better, one would say that a great, big, collective cooldown is inevitable. But rather than take my word for it, let's go to the projections.

Ask FanGraphs, and it'll say that the Dodgers offense will go from producing 5.31 runs per game to 4.46 runs per game the rest of the way. Baseball Prospectus figures it'll be more like 4.37 runs per game, but the message is the same. Sooner or later, the Dodgers offense will regress to the mean.

Presumably, Puig's absence will help make it sooner rather than later. The longer his bat remains out of the lineup, the odds of the Dodgers offense finally going to a slump will get closer to 1:1.

As far as Terrifying Signals of Doom go, however, this one isn't actually that terrifying. 

Mark J. Terrill/Associated Press

Though the Dodgers offense has gotten all the credit, the Dodgers have also been among the best at preventing runs. They've allowed 3.34 runs per game, third fewest in MLB.

Given that they've been doing this without a dominant Clayton Kershaw, any starts from Hyun-Jin Ryu and a Kenley Jansen-less bullpen, that may also look like a fluke that will soon regress to the mean.

Or not.

David Zalubowski/Associated Press

At the least, the Dodgers know they can rely on Zack Greinke, whose awesome pitching has him leading the NL in ERA at 1.52. And though Kershaw is off to a slow start with a 4.26 ERA, he's really been better than that. His strikeout (11.4 K/9) and walk (2.2 BB/9) rates are excellent, and batted ball velocity tells us that only four pitchers have generated softer contact than he has.

The wild card is Brett Anderson, who has a 3.52 ERA despite striking out only 16 batters in 30.2 innings. But 63.1 percent of his balls in play are ground balls, and Baseball Prospectus says the defense fielding these grounders is one of the 10 most efficient defenses in MLB.

Granted, things are shaky in the Dodgers rotation outside of Greinke, Kershaw and Anderson. But three dependable starting pitchers out of five is pretty good, and the Dodgers also have a bullpen capable of picking up any slack that needs to be picked up.

That's a strange thing to say knowing how much the Dodgers bullpen struggled in 2014. But the Dodgers have a much different cast of characters in their pen in 2015, and so far they've produced a 1.94 ERA and, according to FanGraphs, more WAR than any other bullpen.

That's a bullpen that doesn't need any more help. But it's going to get some anyway.

Steve Dilbeck has reported that Jansen is in line to be activated off the DL on Saturday. That means an already excellent Dodgers bullpen will be getting back a relief ace with a career 2.25 ERA and 4.5 K/BB ratio. Upon his return, the Dodgers bullpen could be the NL's answer to the Kansas City Royals bullpen.

In other words, what's already been excellent run prevention has a real chance to get even better. That obviously bodes well, as it would mean the Dodgers would still have a sizable margin for error even if their offense hits its inevitable cooldown before Puig's return.

The entire Dodgers/Puig situation can be summed up in about 1,500 words. I know because I just did it. 

But in the end, it's simple. The Dodgers are a really well-constructed team. And no matter how good the player, teams that are really well-constructed don't live and die with the status of a single player.

Note: Stats courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com unless otherwise noted/linked.

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