Mookie Betts May Salvage His Season Yet

Mookie Betts entered the year as an eight-time All-Star, six-time Gold Glove winner, the majors’ only active position player with three World Series rings, and a likely future Hall of Famer. Not one to back down from a challenge, he’s turned himself into an exceptional shortstop after spending a good chunk of 2024 battling the position to a bloody draw. Yet after a mysterious illness knocked him out of the season-opening Tokyo Series and sapped his strength, he spent the first four months of this season struggling at the plate due to mechanical compromises and, by his own admission, a spiral of self-doubt. Over the past six weeks, he’s finally come around — and not a moment too soon as the Dodgers cling to a narrow NL West lead.

The offensive decline of the 32-year-old Betts seemed to come out of nowhere. Though he missed eight weeks last summer due to a fractured left hand, and didn’t hit the ball nearly as hard as in 2023, when he set a career high with 39 homers, Betts had an excellent season at the plate. He hit .289/.372/.491, with all three slash stats placing among the NL’s top eight and his 140 wRC+ ranking fifth — down 25 points from 2023, but matching his career mark to that point.

He hasn’t come close to approximating that level this season. Shortly before the Dodgers departed for Japan, Betts contracted a mysterious virus that not only sidelined him for those two games against the Cubs, but also prevented him from eating full meals and caused him to lose 23 pounds, no small matter for a 180-pound athlete. Yet he was back in the lineup for the Dodgers’ stateside opener against the Tigers on March 27, homered twice the next day, and started all but two of the team’s next 54 games.

Betts’ offense wasn’t much to write home about through the season’s first two months, but it wasn’t bad, either. Through the end of May, he hit a modest .254/.338/.405 (109 wRC+) with eight homers. After those two on March 28, he hit one against the Braves on April 1, but added just one more during the remainder of the month and four in May. In late May, he broke a toe on his left foot and missed four games, and while he collected 10 hits in his first five games back, June was his least productive month… at least until July.

Within those two summer months, Betts endured what was probably the worst stretch of his career. From June 9 through July 23 — a span of 153 plate appearances — he hit just .179/.235/.271 (36 wRC+), and was even worse than that over shorter stretches.

While his offensive game was falling apart, Betts was nonetheless doing more than enough on the other side of the ball to justify his spot in the lineup. After splitting his 2023 season between right field (77 starts), second base (62 starts), and shortstop (12 starts), he started 61 games at short last year plus another 12 at second before getting injured, then moved back to right field upon returning in mid-August. Determined to prove that he could handle shortstop, he worked hard over the winter to improve his footwork and his arm slots. It’s paid off, as his 17 DRS is tied with Taylor Walls for the major league lead, and his 3 FRV is at least pointed in the same direction. By comparison, last year he had 3 DRS and -3 FRV at shortstop in a bit less than half as many innings.

All of that bought Betts plenty of rope, but manager Dave Roberts started to confront the issue of the ongoing slump after the All-Star break. He benched Betts for the team’s July 19 game against the Brewers, then tried to jump-start him by flip-flopping him and Shohei Ohtani in the batting order. Less than a week after that one-game benching, with the Dodgers visiting his old Fenway Park haunt, Betts flew home to Tennessee to be with his family after his stepfather passed away. Upon returning, he strung together back-to-back two-hit games on July 28 and 29 against the Reds, but immediately followed that with a career-worst 0-for-22 slump.

During that slide, Betts met with former Red Sox and Dodgers teammate J.D. Martinez for some swing pointers in Tampa. He also solicited advice from teammate Freddie Freeman, who observed to Fox Sports’ Rowan Kavner, “His shoulders were tilted up too much for me. When he was swinging, his left shoulder was higher than his right.”

Finally in early August, Betts emerged from his slump, his bat showing signs of life as he elevated the ball with greater consistency. “Not to get into all the details of it, but the big thing is he’s inside the baseball,” Dodgers hitting coach Robert Van Scoyoc told Kavner. “So, when he is out in front, he drives it in the air, not on the ground on the pull side.”

Betts ran off an eight-game hitting streak from August 5–13, batting .400/.447/.543. On August 8, he homered off Max Scherzer, his first homer since July 5, and one that stirred up a recollection of his stepfather. “Every home run I’ve ever hit he’s always texted me, ‘Home run Mookie time!’” Betts said afterwards. “That’s just what he says and then it has the number of homers after. Not getting that text was sad.”

That night, Betts admitted, “I just got lost and I spiraled. It’s the first time I’ve ever spiraled like that. I was in new territory in a slump like this.” He let go of concern about his statistics:

“My season’s kind of over. We’re going to have to chalk that up as not a great season… But I can go out and help the boys win every night, do something, get an RBI, make a play, do something that I’m going to have to shift my focus there… You just worry about game to game.”

Since August 5, Betts has hit .352/.408/.578 (178 wRC+), including a 13-for-31 stretch with four homers from September 4–10 — against the Pirates, Orioles, and Rockies in what should have been a soft part of the schedule for the Dodgers — lifting his overall line to a more respectable .260/.328/.409 (105 wRC+) entering play Friday.

Looking into his numbers, a few things stand out. In the throes of his slump, Betts became particularly prone to chasing pitches outside the strike zone.

Betts is an exceptionally disciplined hitter, with a career 19.9% chase rate; he’s never even been above 24% in a season, so if he’s chasing 31.1% of pitches outside the zone, or swinging at 52.4% of the pitches he sees, it’s a sign his approach has collapsed. That’s basically where he was in June and July. Consider his rolling chase rate:

At its peak on July 5, Betts was chasing 38.9% of pitches outside the zone, as though he were channeling a hacker like Nick Castellanos or Javier Báez. He’s only had one comparable spike in his career, during 2015, his first full season.

Betts has been particularly prone to chasing breaking pitches this season; last year, he chased 24% of sliders and 20.3% of curves outside the zone, while this year those rates have risen to 38.8% and 34.8%. His performance against breaking pitches has set career worsts for both batting average (.197) and slugging percentage (.361), down from .250 AVG/.478 SLG last year. Against the largest subset of those pitches, sliders (which accounted for 14.5% of all pitches he faced last year and 15.7% this year), he’s dropped from .314 AVG/.657 SLG to .200 AVG/.368 SLG, with his whiff rate against them rising from 20.9% to 24.5%.

Moving on, both Betts’ bat-tracking data and contact data support the notion that he’s stronger now than he was at the start of the season, when he’d lost weight due to his illness. He’s not a hitter who swings hard very often these days, with last year’s average bat speed of 69.0 mph placing in the 13th percentile and this year, with the same average, in the 11th percentile. Here’s the month-by-month breakdown:

Betts’ bat speed this month is 2.6 mph ahead of where it was in March and April, and his fast-swing rate (the share of his swings that are 75 mph or higher) has quadrupled across that span, with his blast rate nearly tripling. Comparing what came before July 31 to what’s come after, his fast-swing rate has basically doubled, with his squared-up and blast rates improving substantially.

The story is similar when it comes to his contact, as he’s cut his groundball rate substantially:

Here’s a monthly breakdown of his basic Statcast data:

Betts’ batting average and slugging percentage have generally lagged well behind his Statcast expected numbers all season, making the meager contact from his first four months look even worse than it was. He was successful in a very slap-tacular way in August — note that 2% barrel rate and .334 xBA — but has been punishing the ball in September. His overall barrel rate of 5.6% is still less than half what it was in 2023 (12.4%). Looking back at his bat-tracking data and contact numbers for 2024, one could make the case that he was compromised when he returned from his broken hand last August, but any notion of that injury carrying over into 2025 runs up against his .290/.387/.565 line with four homers, a 9.3% barrel rate, and a .469 xSLG during the Dodgers’ championship run last fall.

Despite their A-list rotation finally coming together with the returns of Tyler Glasnow and Blake Snell from bouts of shoulder inflammation, the Dodgers have been mediocre during Betts’ resurgence, going 19-18 since the start of August even while maintaining a three-game lead in the NL West. Ohtani, Betts, and Freeman, their big three atop the lineup, have been the only regulars to post a wRC+ of 100 or better in that span. Meanwhile, the slumps of otherwise reliable contributors such as Will Smith, Teoscar Hernández, and Andy Pages have coincided with the loss of Max Muncy to an oblique strain, and the persistence of Michael Conforto on the roster despite his season-long collapse:

All of this — including a shaky bullpen — has left the Dodgers rather vulnerable as compared to years past. Even if they hold on to win their 12th division title in 13 seasons, they face the prospect of playing a best-of-three Wild Card Series for the first time since the new format was introduced in 2022, as they’re four games behind the Phillies (84-60) in the race for the second seed. These aren’t last year’s Dodgers, and this isn’t last year’s Betts, but their odds of another deep playoff run are still better now that their shortstop has found his stroke.