Are the Dodgers through with Yasiel Puig?

Here’s where life gets more interesting for Yasiel Puig, just in case the past five years weren’t interesting enough.

Here’s where grown-up baseball becomes grown-up life, as in the habits in the 21 hours around the game, and being accountable to the gift, and hearing for perhaps the first time in his life, “You’re not good enough today,” if that’s what the Dodgers are saying to Yasiel Puig. Sounds like they are.

He is 25 years old. On Tuesday it is expected he will be optioned to Triple-A Oklahoma City, and it is expected he will report. He will continue to earn the money he is owed – the balance of $5.5 million this season, then $6.5 million next season, and $7.5 million the season after that.

According to two sources, one with the Dodgers and the other close to Puig, the club on Monday morning notified Puig by phone he would be traded, demoted or, due to recurring problems with his hamstring, placed on the disabled list. The team was unable to trade him by Monday’s deadline. Puig assured the team his hamstring was healthy. That left the minor-league option.

In 2013, he arrived in the big leagues in an explosion of tools and exuberance, raw but impossible to turn from. He batted .319 with 19 home runs, a .391 on-base percentage and an arm that idled high. His numbers have declined every season since, and by Sunday evening, due perhaps in part to that unsteady hamstring, Puig was batting .260. His slugging percentage and OPS were at career lows.

Even before the Dodgers acquired outfielder Josh Reddick from the Oakland A’s on Monday, they’d decided there was no room for Puig. It is unknown how far that determination might extend. A week? A month? Until one of their outfielders twists an ankle? Until he hits better? Forever?

Are the Dodgers through with Yasiel Puig?

This is the hard part for Puig, but the part he controls. He is, according to a source, feeling dejected over the turn of events. It won’t feel any better boarding a commercial flight to OKC, or wherever that flight is headed. Not at 25 years old, not when he spun the baseball world on his finger once, not when there is no doubt he is built for this game.

But this is where the grown-up part begins, when he might ask himself one day, “Am I good enough today?”

The question is his to answer. When he does, the game will be waiting.