No, We Don’t Need to Worry About the Dodgers

On Tuesday night, the Dodgers were only a Gavin Lux home run away from falling to a .500 record. A .500 record isn’t generally cause for panic, but it would definitely have been a disappointment for the reigning world champions, a team that was expected to steamroll most of the rest of baseball this season. Just to match 2020’s regular season record, the Dodgers need to add another 24 consecutive wins to Monday night’s win over the Mariners.

So how worried should the third-place Dodgers be? Not very.

The Dodgers Aren’t Actually Playing Poorly

Okay, this header isn’t true if we engage in an ultra-literal reading, but in losing 15 of the last 21 games, the Dodgers have only been outscored by a total of seven runs in the aggregate. The team’s overall Pythagorean record puts them at a 94.5 win pace, below the preseason projections, but not alarmingly so. The bullpen had a 4.48 ERA over this stretch, and while there is a relationship between bullpen performance and Pythagorean performance, the relationship is fairly loose.

I went back through history to look at the Pythagorean performances of all teams that underperformed their expected record by at least two wins after 36 games. Over the rest of the seasons, those teams fell short of their Pythagorean records by about a tenth of a run on average. In other words, the discrepancy between expected record and actual record in the early season is mostly noise, as opposed to hiding something sinister about a team’s true abilities.

The Bullpen’s Outlook Hasn’t Changed Much…

Even if you could definitively point to the bullpen as the main cause of the 6-15 run, there’s still no reason to think the overall quality of the relief corps has changed significantly. The team’s bullpen outlook has gotten worse, with the group’s combined rest-of-season projected FIP going up by 0.03 runs (3.98 to 4.01) while the rest of the league has seen theirs drop by 0.12 runs. You’d rather be on the positive side of the ledger, but that only drops their overall ranking in our Depth Charts from sixth to eighth. And yes, those Depth Charts reflect the reduced playing time from Corey Knebel (down to just three projected innings) and Brusdar Graterol already.

…Nor Has That of the Rest of the Roster

While the projections for the rest of the team have declined slightly, it hasn’t been the equivalent of falling off a cliff. With one notable exception (see the next section), none of the hitters have seen their wRC+ projections drop by 10 points, nor have any members of the expected rotation seen their prognostications turn sour.

You’d rather improve slightly than decline, but the overall changes are fairly small. The changes in expectation have only dropped the rotation from second to third in our Depth Chart rankings. The position players have declined from the best overall preseason projection all the way to…second. Overall, we still project the Dodgers to be the best team in baseball over the rest of the season, just as we did a month ago. The only change is in the magnitude of that dominance.

The Roster Isn’t Radically Different

Naturally, injuries have the potential to turn projections upside down. One of the worst team mistakes ZiPS has ever churned out was for the 2014 Texas Rangers. Coming off a 91-win season, ZiPS projected the team to regress to 86 wins. Instead, the team went 67-95, dropping to last in the AL West. The largest difference between the projections and what actually happened didn’t come from the projections for the individual players, but who actually played. The pitching staff was decimated by injuries, basically losing the entire 2013 rotation for large parts of the season. The fill-ins were a parade of players with bleak forecasts: Joe Saunders, Scott Baker, pre-KBO resurgence Miles Mikolas, etc. Knowing who actually got the playing time and applying it to the preseason projections would have dropped the win projections under 70.

The Dodgers are not in that situation. Most of their key players are still expected to pretty much fill their anticipated roles this year. Losing Dustin May to injury is, of course, a Very Bad Thing, but in terms of the preseason outlook, he wasn’t one of the top 10 reasons the Dodgers were expected to win 100 games. There are other injuries as well, but the team’s IL isn’t bloated compared to that of other contenders. The Padres have lost Adrian Morejon, and there are questions about Dinelson Lamet‘s health. Atlanta lost Travis d’Arnaud, and Mike Soroka’s return has been pushed back to June. The Mets have been missing Carlos Carrasco and Seth Lugo. Eloy Jiménez and Luis Robert are missing from the White Sox.

The Hole Isn’t Deep Yet

The Dodgers are a game behind the Padres, but this race was always expected to be a dogfight, so that’s nothing new. Los Angeles stands three games behind the surprising San Francisco Giants, but the preseason expectations — 20 wins or more — provide a lot of room for error. If the Dodgers are actually that much better than the Giants, 126 games is far more runway than is needed.

So when should the Dodgers worry? To get an idea, I took the ZiPS in-season projections and projected how the divisional and playoff probabilities change with the assumption that teams continue winning at their current rate without any change in team strength. In other words, if the Giants continue to have a .611 winning percentage and the Dodgers keep underperforming and stay at .528, when does the team run out of margin for error? I checked the numbers after every 10 subsequent games.

Based on our current best estimate of the relative strengths of the NL West teams, the deficit doesn’t become concerning for the Dodgers until the end of June or so, leaving them plenty of time to improve the team at the trade deadline. However, an unpleasant surprise, such as a serious injury to another key contributor, could move that date earlier on the calendar.

The Dodgers faced a similar issue in 2018, to the extent that they actually briefly had a losing record after D-Day. They eventually won the division, but it was a close affair, requiring a 163rd game against the Rockies to grab the divisional crown. The Dodgers have an extra month to get off the schneid this time around. Until things turn in a more negative direction, the 2021 Dodgers are less the Titanic and more your average airline flight running into a bit of light turbulence.