The Dodgers have already solved one postseason problem, and it may have come with a name that wasn’t on many radar screens a week ago.
After sweeping the San Francisco Giants in extra innings on Sunday, Los Angeles now gets four days to sort out its NLDS roster before opening against either the Philadelphia Phillies or the Atlanta Braves at Dodger Stadium. There are still questions to answer, especially in the bullpen, where Blake Treinen’s season ended with a shoulder issue, Edwin Díaz has been better since coming off the IL, Edgardo Henriquez is trending toward availability, and the Dodgers still have to sort through the Roki Sasaki situation.
But the most interesting roster battle has nothing to do with those arms. It’s the fight between the Dodgers’ top prospects, Josue De Paula and Dalton Rushing.
De Paula was optioned back to Triple-A after Shohei Ohtani returned from the IL, while Rushing was activated ahead of the Giants series. Even so, De Paula appears to have the edge, and he’ll be in Los Angeles during the bye week as the team weighs its options.
The Dodgers are carrying three catchers right now in Rushing, Will Smith, and Hunter Feduccia. Any catcher they choose as the backup would still be clearly behind Smith, just as the role usually is.
Last year, Ben Rortvedt started two games in the NL Wild Card Series while Smith was coming back from an injury, but Rortvedt didn’t appear again after Game 2 of the NLDS. In that sense, Feduccia makes more sense than Rushing for the job, even if Rushing is the more valuable piece in most other situations.
What LA wants is a left-handed bat it can stash on the bench, and De Paula seems to have won that argument almost immediately. Rushing, meanwhile, was stuck on the IL and couldn’t make his case in the same way.
The only real question now is how the Dodgers get De Paula onto the roster. He would need to replace an injured player who has already served the minimum time on the IL, and by bringing Rushing back, the Dodgers made the logistics more complicated than they needed to be.
Still, Andrew Friedman should be able to work it out. De Paula may only get a handful of at-bats in October, but the Dodgers clearly trust him enough to keep him in the conversation.
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The video leans directly into the history between the two, pointing back to the on-field incidents that made every meeting feel like it carried extra heat. Puigs path since leaving the Dodgers has taken him through several other teams, but the reaction to this clip shows how deeply those matchups still live in the minds of fans who remember when every Dodgers-Giants chapter seemed to come with a little more edge. [Read more 🡒]