Dodgers won’t sit Will Smith, even as his postseason hitting struggles deepen

The Dodgers’ postseason dilemma is not whether Will Smith can help them win, it is whether he can do it while hitting like a player in trouble. Smith, their regular catcher and a central piece of the lineup’s middle, has been going through a difficult stretch at the plate, but the Dodgers’ position is straightforward: benching him would create a bigger problem than the one his slump already presents.

Smith’s value to Los Angeles starts with catching. In high-leverage postseason games, teams tend to lean on stability behind the plate, where pitch-calling, game management, and the pitcher-catcher relationship become magnified. That foundation is part of why the Dodgers, according to Yahoo Sports, cannot treat his offensive downturn as a reason to remove him from the lineup.

Yahoo Sports framed the moment as one where the Dodgers have a significant hole in the heart of their batting order, and the catch is that the most obvious answer, sitting Smith, would not actually address the underlying needs of the roster. Even if his at-bats have not been producing, replacing him can mean losing the specific catcher presence the pitching staff has been built around for the season and for the postseason run.

The article also underscores the contrast in how fans often view batting slumps versus how managers evaluate lineup construction. The Dodgers’ challenge is not simply that Smith has struggled, it is that his role is layered. As a catcher hitting in the middle, he is asked to bridge responsibilities, and the Dodgers are not operating with a comparable “plug-in” option that can match his defensive and positional importance.

Los Angeles’ postseason context adds pressure to every lineup decision. In Game 1 of the postseason series, Smith batted in a 2-1 loss to the Milwaukee Brewers, per the image caption associated with the report. That detail matters because it points to the narrow margins the Dodgers are playing with, where each change to the batting order and each shift in defensive personnel can ripple across both run prevention and late-inning leverage.

Still, the Dodgers’ approach does not eliminate the central issue, it just reframes it. Hitting is the production Smith has been struggling to provide, and the longer the slump lingers, the more the middle of the lineup has to carry a burden it typically does not bear. If Smith’s bat fails to stabilize, the Dodgers can find themselves forced into repeated adjustments, even if they would prefer a stable core at catcher.

What to watch next is less about whether Smith gets benched and more about whether his slump shows signs of narrowing. The next few games will likely reveal whether the Dodgers can absorb the offensive gap while their overall structure holds, or whether the batting order must get reshaped in ways that compromise the other strengths Smith brings.

If the Dodgers do keep Smith in the lineup, the bar for improvement will be high and immediate. They will need contributions from across the order to cover the middle, because postseason baseball punishes prolonged droughts. For Smith, that means the question becomes whether this slump is a temporary stall or a longer course correction problem that the Dodgers will have to solve around, not with him.