Josue De Paula has moved quickly from intriguing bat to central piece of the Dodgers’ thinking for 2027, and the organization is making one thing clear: the offensive upside is already obvious, but the glove still has to come along.
De Paula, 21, gives the Dodgers a chance to hit two needs at once. If he settles into left field, Los Angeles could get immediate help there while also injecting some much-needed youth into the roster. That kind of impact is why his role matters so much heading into next season.
The challenge is defense, and the Dodgers aren’t sugarcoating it. General manager Brandon Gomes said the club wants De Paula to keep climbing this offseason and reach a level where he can be trusted as an above-average defender.
“We’ve all seen what he’s capable of in the box, which is incredibly exciting,” Dodgers general manager Brandon Gomes said. “With that being said, we have a very talented core group already here, so I think it’s finding those opportunities but also making sure that throughout this offseason and coming into Spring Training that he continues to improve and gets to that bar and gets to be an above-average defender.
“We’re not looking just to be like, ‘Oh, well, De Po got pretty good.’ I think his mindset and our coaching staff and all of us is to make him as good of a defensive outfielder as he can to be a full player. Because that’s what we expect of all of our guys that step on the field.”
The numbers back up the need for more progress. Over 2,888 career minor league innings, De Paula has posted a .954 fielding percentage as a corner outfielder. Last season at Double-A Tulsa, he committed eight errors between left and right field.
Still, there’s belief inside the front office that the improvements are real. Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman pointed to De Paula’s step forward from 2025 to 2026 and said his September call-up gave the youngster something valuable beyond game action.
“I think the improvement he showed from ’25 to ’26, I think that gets lost a bit. He showed marked improvement from ’25 to ’26. And for us, it was about you know the added benefit of him coming up in September, being on our playoff roster, being around,” Friedman said.
“I think him coming up, the way our guys welcomed him in the clubhouse, him being around our players and seeing how they prepare and what they do before a game, I think really landed with him in a way that words from us or our Minor League staff couldn’t have accomplished in the same way.
“So him being able to see that, the challenge that we will lay out to him, but the growth from ’25 to ’26 was real. And now we’re looking for real growth from ’26 to ’27, and then the sky’s the limit.”
Exactly how much he improved, and where the gains showed up, isn’t publicly known. Advanced defensive data for the minors isn’t available, so the picture is incomplete.
De Paula has also been working to clean up that side of his game during his first taste of the majors. He said he wants the talk about his defensive issues to stop.
At the plate, though, the buzz is already very real. De Paula has drawn Juan Soto comparisons because of his eye, and in a game against the Cincinnati Reds, he even copied the “Soto shuffle” before correctly reading a pitch as a ball.
Soto saw the video and called De Paula a “special” player.
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