Kuzul

There’s going to be a lot of pressure on Yasiel Puig when the Los Angeles Dodgers take the field in 2015.

Alright, maybe that sounds like stating the obvious. Between the pressure on him to behave and the pressure on him to perform, there’s always pressure on Puig. But it will be a different, more heightened sort of pressure in 2015, and whether he’ll be able to respond to it is a good question.

You’ve surely noticed how actively the Dodgers have been making changes this winter, and how the process has meant waving goodbye to a pair of dangerous hitters: Hanley Ramirez and Matt Kemp.

Thanks to how much the club’s run-prevention outlook has improved, its departures aren’t an outright disaster. And yet, there’s no ignoring the step back the Dodgers have taken on offense, as the top half of their lineup now looks considerably less scary.

To borrow from Dayn Perry of CBSSports.com, it now looks like this:

That’s not a bad top five, mind you, but it pales in comparison to what the top five of Don Mattingly’s batting order typically looked like in 2014:

With Kemp and Ramirez gone, the Dodgers are going from a top five that featured four hitters with an OPS+ (a park and league-adjusted OPS where 100 is average) of at least 130 to a projected top five with half as many.

That’s the overall picture. More specifically, there’s how the Dodgers lineup has been stripped of a unique right-handed fear factor. By OPS+, Puig, Kemp and Ramirez gave the Dodgers three of the 18 best right-handed hitters in MLB last year. No other team had more than two.

Because the Dodgers have yet to acquire another elite righty hitter, their hopes of enjoying the luxury of elite right-handed hitting in 2015 rest with Puig. And while that wouldn’t seem like too much to ask in light of how Puig was virtually Miguel Cabrera’s equal in 2014, make no mistake about it: He’ll need to be better.

On the whole, Puig really did have a terrific 2014. He wasn’t as dangerous as he was in his outstanding rookie season, but there’s no reason to be ashamed of a .296/.382/.480 batting line.

However, Puig’s 2014 was a tale of two seasons. He started off incredibly hot and finished…well, not so incredibly hot.

Here’s the breakdown:

Puig wasn’t a “bad” hitter in those last 100 games. According to FanGraphs, he still walked more and struck out less than the average hitter. Also, a .763 OPS is 63 points better than 2014’s average OPS.

Nonetheless, just how much Puig’s production fell off is downright cringeworthy, especially in the power department. He was on pace for easily over 30 home runs early on, but he hit only five the rest of the way while his slugging percentage dropped over 200 points.

Rather than Cabrera’s equal, the down-the-stretch Puig was more like Casey McGehee’s equal. If that’s the Puig who shows up in 2015, there’s no way he’s going to mitigate the loss of Kemp and Ramirez.

But this is not to say Puig can’t recover from his dismal showing down the stretch in 2014. He’ll be able to if he fixes what was ailing him.

If you’re thinking this means Puig needs to turn his emotional dial to somewhere below 11, his manager would probably agree. Here’s what Mattingly told Mark Saxon of ESPN Los Angeles in late August:

The season is long, and it wears you down. It’s part of learning to regulate yourself here, as far as rest or anything else. We’ve seen Dee Gordon and how much more consistent his approach is day in and day out now, staying at a certain level. I think Yasiel’s really emotional, and it’s hard to be really emotional and play 162.

Because Puig did seem to let his frustration get the better of him at times down the stretch, Mattingly might have a point. Maybe Puig really can help himself by becoming more robotic.

Either that, or he can focus on making a more tangible adjustment. Rather than worrying about policing his emotions, he should be worried about once again rewriting the scouting report on him.

One reason Puig started off so hot in 2014 was because he was crushing hard stuff. According to Brooks Baseball, he hit the first 539 fastballs he saw at a .352 clip with a .611 slugging percentage.

Not surprisingly, pitchers responded by adjusting.

Puig’s overall percentage of hard stuff went from 68.1 in his first 48 games to 64.5 in his last 100 games. Pitchers also went from pounding him almost exclusively inside to pounding him both inside and outside.

In other words, they became far less predictable when Puig was at bat. And for Puig, there were a couple production-killing effects.

That Puig saw more slow pitches and a less predictable fastball pattern explains why his strikeout rate went up. It also helps explain why, according to FanGraphs, his ground-ball percentage went from 48.6 to 53.5. That, in particular, is a good way to kill power.

But something else killed Puig’s power, too: All of a sudden, he basically stopped driving the ball at will.

Here, check out his early-season spray chart:

And now compare it to what came after:

Early on, Puig was spraying the ball with authority all over the field. But as the season wore on, his batted balls consisted mainly of grounders to third and short, and liners and flies to right field.

Even with Puig’s considerable power to right field, it’s hard to be a consistent power producer when you’re only hitting the ball that way. His numbers in his final 100 games can vouch, and you can rest assured that pitchers know this. They won’t quit using their new approach until Puig makes them.

To this end, time will tell. But if it’s optimism you want, you’re not going to leave empty-handed.

Because Puig gives off vibes of being a big, dumb brute, counting on him making necessary adjustments may sound like a bad idea. But it’s anything but, as making adjustments has quietly been a talent of his.

For instance, you can look at how Puig went from being a wild hitter in 2013 to an advanced hitter in 2014. Per FanGraphs, his chase rate went from 38.9 to 30.2, and his contact rate went from 67.6 to 74.7. Huge improvements, those are.

There’s also why pitchers suddenly refused to feed Puig a steady diet of inside fastballs in 2014. That was a case of him changing the book on how it was safe to pitch him. According to BaseballSavant.com, he went from slugging .411 against inside heat in 2013 to slugging .725 against it early on in 2014.

At FanGraphs, Jeff Sullivan noted that this is an improvement Puig was hoping to make and how, even though the actual improvement had consequences, it’s encouraging that he pulled it off:

In working to get better against inside fastballs, Puig subsequently opened himself up a little more against fastballs away…But between years, he set his mind to getting better against something, and it appears he mostly pulled it off. That’s not something we often observe, which is what makes this so interesting.

Elsewhere, you can even look to how Puig didn’t exactly have the worst idea in becoming more of an opposite-field hitter down the stretch in 2014. He got carried away with it, but looking to go the other way more often in the face of more slow stuff and fastballs away is the way to go.

So, we’ve seen Puig become a more advanced hitter. We’ve seen him turn a safe haven for pitchers into a death zone. We’ve seen him put up a solid fight in the face of a tougher pitching strategy. Knowing this, it’s not nuts to think that his next adjustment will be to not let pitchers dictate how he hits the ball.

If so, his power should come back. And if his power comes back, he’ll look more like the world-destroying hitter he was early on in 2014, which is just the hitter the Dodgers need to offset the departures of Kemp and Ramirez.

Given everything involved in it, the challenge that lies before Puig is the greatest he’s faced as a big leaguer. It will be some time before we know if he’s able to handle it.

But for now, we can say this: I wouldn’t put it past him.

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

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