The Dodgers are about to find out how good they really are.
With $69-million closer Edwin Diaz sidelined until some time after the All-Star break, the team is bracing itself for the possibility that $182-million starting pitcher Blake Snell will be on a similar schedule.
Snell is expected to undergo an operation next week to remove bone chips from his elbow, people familiar with the situation told The California Post.
The traditional timeline to return from such operations is 14 weeks, but that could be significantly reduced by the use of a new surgical instrument. Even then, Snell will likely be out until July or August.
In which case, the next couple of months will serve as the ultimate stress test for baseball’s most expensive roster.
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The Dodgers were built to withstand losses like Snell’s and Diaz’s.
In theory, their $415-million payroll bought them a margin for error that should allow them to overcome the absence of any player — or two or three. In theory, they are so much better than any other team that they should be able to win without playing their best baseball.
Can they do what they did last year when they became repeat World Series champions?
They’re about to find out.
They’re about to find out if their offense is as explosive as it was in the first three weeks of the season or as impotent as it’s been for the majority of the last month.
The Dodgers will have to figure out how to score runs with a version of Shohei Ohtani who looks worn down from being a full-time two-way player.
Fully committed to Ohtani’s vision of playing both ways, they were already showing zero interest in asking their cash cow to make significant reductions to his pitching or hitting responsibilities.
This used to be a choice, but it’s not one anymore, not with Snell down, not with Tyler Glasnow not expected to be ready to pitch when he’s eligible to be activated from the injured list next Friday.
That means the previously-slumping Teoscar Hernandez has to maintain his semblance of the form he showed in the batter’s box over the last week. That means Mookie Betts has to be an All-Star-caliber offensive player again. That means Freddie Freeman has to start hitting with more power. That means Kyle Tucker has to be the $240 million player the Dodgers believed they signed. That means Max Muncy has to continue hitting.
Because the pitching staff will be stretched.
The Dodgers have used a six-man rotation up to this point, and manager Dave Roberts said he doesn’t want to decrease the number of days his starters have between starts.
There’s one major problem with that.
“Right now, I don’t think we have six candidates,” Roberts said.
The situation could force the Dodgers to resort to a bullpen game once every six games, further exhausting a group of relievers already subjected to long workdays by the inclusion of Roki Sasaki and Emmet Sheehan in the rotation.
The Dodgers are familiar with how problematic such a dynamic could be. Just last year, their bullpen was gassed by the middle of the season, contributing to a losing month in July.
“It seems like every year, we go through it,” Roberts said. “What I have learned is [that] we get through it.”
And they would be guaranteed to do so again if they could play the Angels every night.
The rent-a-manager of the Fallen Angels of Anaheim, Kurt Suzuki, claimed his team was in a “cold stretch,” a phrase that takes extreme liberties with the word “stretch.”
The Angels are awful. They’re really awful. They’re so awful that nothing should be read into the Dodgers’ 6-0 pasting of them on Friday night in a game that Snell was originally scheduled to start.
Will Klein was the opener in a bullpen game in which the Dodgers used eight pitchers. Hernandez, Muncy and Andy Pages homered.
They did what they had to do against the Angels. Then again, most teams do.
But the Dodgers were designed to be far superior to most teams. They were designed to perform like this against the Padres, the Brewers and every other contender they will take on in the next couple of months.
