Dodgers Interview: Smith praises Yamamoto as team dodges disaster
"We just kept fighting."
LOS ANGELES — If Tuesday night’s 4–3 extra-inning win over the Diamondbacks felt like an emotional roller coaster, Will Smith was strapped in the front row the whole time.
Behind the plate, he caught Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s dominant seven-inning performance. At the plate, he delivered in two of the most crucial moments of the game—an RBI double to get the Dodgers on the board in the eighth and a hit-by-pitch with the bases loaded in the tenth to tie the game and keep the season’s most chaotic win alive.
But Smith wasn’t focused on the drama—he was locked in on the details.
“Yeah, he was just mixing,” Smith said about Yamamoto’s outing. “His curveball was really good tonight. His cutter, you know, turned out to be really good tonight as well. Obviously, he’s always got good fastball command. His changeup—his splitter—was really good. So yeah, just mixing it up, keeping them off balance, you know, going up, down, in, out, all that. He just executed. It was really fun to do.”
Yamamoto relied more heavily on his breaking stuff than usual, and it wasn’t necessarily the plan going in—it just worked. “Was leaning on that curveball. Was that more kind of game plan or was that just kind of how it was playing?” Smith was asked. “Yeah, just kind of how it was playing,” he said. “He was striking really well. He was getting outs below with two strikes. Just kind of, you know, rolling with it.”
Of course, the Dodgers needed more than a great start to pull this one off. The final innings were full of momentum swings: Tanner Scott gave up home runs in both the ninth and tenth innings, and the team was staring down another crushing loss. But the dugout stayed steady.
“We just kept fighting,” Smith said. “Obviously had the big shutdown inning in the eighth to leave the man on, nobody out in the third and stuff. Yeah, it’s not fun giving up a tying run in the ninth. Battle back, got down 3–1 again, battle back, put some good ABs up, got it started, and my team finished it.”
Smith, as usual, was a stabilizing force. His two-strike double in the eighth gave the Dodgers life, and when the pressure was at its highest in the tenth, he took a pitch off the body to tie the game at three. Just another example of the kind of quiet, relentless contribution fans have come to expect from him.
And even in a game where the Dodgers bent—and nearly broke—they never quit. “We just kept fighting,” Smith said.
On a night full of tense moments, Will Smith and the Dodgers came out with their fight intact—and a win to show for it.
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