Dodgers Recap: Smith Walks it Off to Salvage Finale

CHAVEZ RAVINE — If you like your September baseball with a little drama, it showed up a day early on Sunday at Chavez Ravine. The Dodgers beat the Diamondbacks, 5–4, on Will Smith’s pinch-hit walk-off homer in the bottom of the ninth—an emphatic answer after a late collapse nearly spoiled Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s masterpiece.

Yamamoto was fantastic, tying a career high with 10 strikeouts across seven innings of one-run ball. He didn’t walk a batter, needed just 98 pitches (70 strikes), and spent a hot afternoon dotting the zone with fearless efficiency. Arizona nicked him for a run in the fourth, but every “threat” felt more like a speed bump than a detour; Yamamoto punched out the side in the second and kept the D-backs guessing with crisp tempo and command.

The Dodger offense did what you want behind an ace: score early and add on. In the first, Shohei Ohtani ripped a single, Mookie Betts followed with another, and Freddie Freeman split the gap for an RBI double. Andy Pages then cashed in a second run with a soft bouncer to short. Workmanlike, no panic, 2–0.

In the fourth, Miguel Rojas—quietly excellent all day—shot a single to right to score Alex Call and push it to 3–1, immediately answering Arizona’s tally from the top half. One inning later, Betts singled and Pages lined a base hit to left to make it 4–1. Insurance runs in back-to-back frames: exactly the script this club wants as the bullpen door swings open.

But baseball rarely follows a script, and the eighth inning has become too familiar for Dodger fans lately. Tanner Scott took the ball to protect the three-run cushion and got two quick outs. Then came the unraveling: a Perdomo flare to right, a sharp Ketel Marte single to left, and Corbin Carroll turned a 2-0 pitch into a three-run, game-tying blast to left-center. Just like that—two on, two out, one swing, 4–4. It goes down as Scott’s eighth blown save and another data point in a back-end ledger that hasn’t inspired confidence.

Enter Blake Treinen to staunch the bleeding in the ninth, and he was every bit the silent assassin: eight pitches, seven strikes, three outs. Efficient. Nasty. Necessary. His shutdown frame set the table for a walk-off chance the Dodgers weren’t about to waste.

Dave Roberts went to his bench and called on Will Smith to bat for Dalton Rushing to start the bottom of the ninth. Two pitches later, the game was over. Smith absolutely torched a John Curtiss offering to left-center for his 17th of the year, a no-doubt shot that sent 51,803 into delirium and sent the Dodgers into their flight East with a series win and a 4–2 homestand in their pocket.

For Smith, who’s scuffled through much of August, the swing felt bigger than one game. The catcher’s track record says the tide eventually turns; perhaps this was the crack of thunder that heralds clearer skies. For the lineup, there were plenty of complementary positives: Betts posted a two-hit day at shortstop, Freeman doubled and walked, Pages drove in two, and Rojas stacked two more singles with a key RBI. They out-hit Arizona 10–7 and cashed in three times with runners in scoring position—precisely the incremental scoring that should make late innings less perilous.

That it almost didn’t hold underscores the tension point on this roster: bridging dominant starts to Treinen without the cardiac spikes. Scott has the stuff, but the misses have been middle-middle too often, and the “bad-ball” contact has been loud. The Dodgers don’t need dominance there; they need reliability. Today’s flip from cruise control to white-knuckle in two batters is the kind of thing that haunts October if it isn’t tightened up.

Still, the macro picture is solid. At 78–59, the Dodgers finish the homestand exactly where they started the weekend—two games clear of the Padres in the NL West—and now head out for their final East Coast swing: Pittsburgh and then Baltimore. The rotation lines up with Clayton Kershaw on Tuesday and Shohei Ohtani on Wednesday. Circle Thursday in bold: Blake Snell vs. Paul Skenes is as marquee as it gets—veteran Cy Young vs. the sport’s electric young flamethrower in a potential playoff-caliber atmosphere.

If Sunday is a preview of the stretch-run version of this club, the formula is clear: frontline starting, additive offense, Treinen to slam the door—and a trusted middle lane that turns late-inning angst into routine handshakes. Oh, and one more thing: a locked-in Will Smith changes the whole heartbeat of the lineup. One swing won a game today. It might have jump-started September.

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