LOS ANGELES — We are less than a week into the domestic portion of the regular season, and we have already reached one of the most aesthetically-displeasing facets of the modern era of baseball. The Dodgers are running a bullpen game on Tuesday night. Really? So soon?

This isn’t necessarily about the decline of modern starting pitcher usage, though the dimming wattage of the star power of starters is definitely part of it. Only 44 pitchers qualified for pitching rate leaderboards last year, reaching 162 innings — just one and a half pitchers per team. In 2018, 58 pitchers qualified; 81 such pitchers qualified in 2013.

No Dodgers pitchers qualified for rate leaderboards in 2023. Clayton Kershaw led the team with 131⅔ innings and 24 starts. Newcomer James Paxton last qualified in 2019, opening day starter Tyler Glasnow has never pitched more than 120 innings in one season in the majors. Yoshinobu Yamamoto did pitch 171 innings last year in Japan, and averaged 186 innings over his last three MVP-winning campaigns, but so far with the Dodgers — including spring training — has not pitched on fewer than six days rest, which will continue this weekend at Wrigley Field after Tuesday’s bullpen game pushes the rotation back a day.

Which brings us to why the Dodgers are using a bullpen game on Tuesday.

During spring training, manager Dave Roberts, general manager Brandon Gomes, and president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman laid out the reasons why the Dodgers wouldn’t regularly use a six-man starting rotation. Mostly, it’s because carrying six starters means only seven relievers on the active roster, which unduly taxes a bullpen that already gets used often.

The Dodgers have already jettisoned multi-inning relievers the day after pitching on Sunday (Kyle Hurt) and Monday (Nabil Crismatt) because they’d be down for a few days, and the team needed innings now. One wonders if Dinelson Lamet after pitching two innings Monday in his first day up from Triple-A might have already sealed his fate for Tuesday.

I do think the Dodgers aren’t using a six-man rotation in the moment, though that might change once Walker Buehler might be ready in a few weeks. I think Tuesday’s bullpen game has more to do with the schedule.

Because the Dodgers started the season in South Korea, they will get two extra off days during the regular, 186-day season relative to the 28 other teams that started domestically. The Dodgers have the first three Thursdays of the season off, then another off day on Monday, April 22. That means for the first 29 regular season games on the schedule — through April 27 — they only had four games in which they might need to use a starter on four days rest, which has been called “regular rest” for some time, but for the Dodgers that hasn’t been the case for some time.

From 2021-23, only 147 of the Dodgers’ 486 starts came on four days rest, just 30 percent of the time. Whenever possible, the Dodgers will try to buy an extra day for their starters. Like on Tuesday.

“I think it will be good,” said starter James Paxton, who pitched five scoreless innings on Monday, his 97 pitches the most thrown so far by a Dodgers starter this season. “I think we’ll kind of take it easy here in the beginning, to give guys extra days, to get rest, to build up that base, and then I’m sure we’ll get going on a more regular schedule.”

Glasnow and Bobby Miller were going to be the ones on regular rest for the final two games against the Giants, had the Dodgers not opted for a bullpen game Tuesday. Both pitched six innings last week against the Cardinals. Glasnow threw only 81 pitches and was mostly cruising. So was Miller in his 11-strikeout performance, though his last inning was the most stressful for him in a relative sense. Two of the three baserunners he allowed came in that sixth inning, and Miller escaped with a strikeout, giving him 93 pitches on the night.

I’d like to think that had Miller’s final inning Friday not been so taxing, the Dodgers might not be using a bullpen game on Tuesday, but that’s probably naive.

Last year the Dodgers used five true bullpen games, not counting the five other times they used an opener ahead of a starter-type pitcher who was expected to pitch at least five innings in bulk relief. The Dodgers were 2-3 in the true bullpen games with a 4.33 ERA, using an average of 4.6 pitchers per game. This doesn’t count the 2023 NLDS, in which the Dodgers had three bullpen games, just not by design.

One of the knocks against a bullpen game is that by using so many pitchers, at least one of them is bound to have a bad night.

Ryan Yarbrough has helped clean that up a bit since joining the Dodgers at the last trade deadline. He’s collected three-inning saves, including one in Thursday’s home opener which leaves him as the bulk pitcher for Tuesday night, he’s pitched in bulk relief, and he’s started, excelling nearly every time, save for one bad outing at Coors Field. In the three bullpen games Yarbrough participated in with the Dodgers last year, the Dodgers only used four, three, and three pitchers each time. In those games, Yarbrough teamed with Gavin Stone (twice) and Ryan Pepiot in dual bulk outings. Michael Grove is the other reliever who might provide length on Tuesday. He last pitched on Friday, allowing three runs in an inning-plus, throwing 28 pitches.

Another ancillary benefit of the Tuesday bullpen game is with Yamamoto moving to Saturday at Wrigley Field, his next start would presumably be on Friday, April 12 against San Diego at home, on five days rest. With Miller pitching this Friday in Chicago, he’d be the first potential Dodgers starter to pitch on four days rest, next Wednesday in Minnesota.

But that’s way too far in the future for our purposes. For the Dodgers, it’s all about getting through Tuesday, and figure out the next day after that.