Bad Habits Derailed Mookie Betts' Season. A New Mindset Might Salvage It.

Fox News

a day ago

Mookie Betts is not afraid to admit how his year has gone.
He knows a few good weeks cannot erase four months of below league-average performance at the plate or lift the burden that the eight-time All-Star has carried throughout the worst offensive season of his illustrious career.
So, he's adopting a different mindset.
"My season's kind of over," Betts said last week. "So, going to have to chalk that up for not a great season. But I can help the boys win every night, do something, get an RBI, make a play, do something to kind of shift my focus there."
It's a new approach, one that his skipper thinks is the right outlook to assist a scuffling Dodgers club. When Betts is right, the three-time World Series champ is a catalyst like few others in the sport.
"Getting small wins and playing to win each night, contributing versus trying to chase a season where you're not kind of realizing your career numbers, I think that is freeing," Dave Roberts said. "That's growth from him."
Lately, there are positive signs. Betts is in the midst of a season-long eight-game hitting streak at a time when his team needs the production the most.
Out of first place in the National League West for the first time since April, the Dodgers host the division-leading Padres this weekend in the first of six crucial matchups over the next 10 days.
If the Dodgers are to repeat as World Series champions, it will be partly due to a turnaround from Betts in a season that presented unexpected obstacles before it even began.
"I'm just trying to stay inside the ball, and kind of see what happens," Betts said. "I've had a couple good games. We'll see how it goes."
Every year, Betts creates a list of goals, which he uses as a marker to chart his progress throughout the course of a season.
There are still 41 regular-season games left in the Dodgers' schedule, yet only one of Betts' objectives remains attainable in a year derailed by illness, injury, personal loss and uncharacteristic performance.
"Try to win," Betts said. "That's the final goal that I can achieve. All the rest of them have 'X's next to them. The one I can achieve is to win a World Series, so I just have to do what I can for that — and that's be in the moment, every game."
A mysterious and vexing stomach virus began to torment Betts when the Dodgers departed on their season-opening trip to Japan. Betts, who needs all of his 175 pounds to generate the power that helps make him one of the game's most decorated threats, began shedding weight at an alarming rate. He lost around 20 pounds in the span of a couple of weeks and missed both games of the Tokyo Series as the unyielding illness ran its course.
He performed admirably immediately upon his return, recording six hits — including three home runs — in his first four games back in the lineup. But he was so underweight that he was trying to manufacture more power and bat speed.
Unknowingly, his mechanics at the plate began to slip in the process. He started working around the baseball in an effort to find the barrel, rather than staying inside the ball as he had done so well throughout his career.
"I just started developing bad habits," Betts said. "Those bad habits, you don't really realize you're doing it, especially early on. When I came back, I had a couple good series, and I'm like, 'All right, we're good.'"
A 6-for-44 stretch that followed in the middle of April, during which he tallied just one extra-base hit, told him otherwise.
"It worked for like a week," Betts recalled, "and then after that it got worse and worse and worse."
Betts recorded a .738 OPS in May. Every time he started to get going, another barrier appeared. He stubbed his toe while walking to the bathroom in the middle of the night and sustained a fracture. Then he tallied a .633 OPS in June.
"I tried everything I know that usually gets me back on track or gets me in the right realm, and I can figure it out from there," Betts said. "But the habits were so bad, man. Where I was, I had never been there before."
He could not find a remedy.
So, the spiral continued.
There were stretches when he thought he might be getting back on track — 10 hits in six games at the end of April, another 10 hits in five games in early June — only for another skid to follow. He posted a season-worst .586 OPS in July, a month in which he was also grappling with the death of his stepfather.
It is all part of navigating life, said Betts, who tries to separate the personal from the professional, as difficult as it is as his trials and tribulations play out on a public stage.
"You do your best," Betts said. "Nobody really cares all that you go through before you play a game. It's just about the results. It kind of is what it is, the nature of this game and really any game, any professional sport.
"Nobody really cares what you go through before, it's just a matter of what you do during that time. I've just been trying to use that time as a getaway."
Betts' routine at the ballpark helps him navigate life's chaos and establish a sense of normalcy, though it looks exhausting.
In the midst of trying to relearn his swing, Betts is also taking on the challenge of becoming a full-time shortstop for the first time in his career at 32 years old. Before every game, he spends hours taking swings in the cage and ground balls on the field. Then he hits some more before first pitch.
By the metric defensive runs saved, he has transformed himself into one of the top five defensive shortstops in MLB. But his defensive success is juxtaposed with a dramatic offensive dropoff. He has the fifth-lowest OPS among all qualified players at his position.
"It's, like, kind of sad, you know?" Betts said. "And I'm not feeling sorry for myself, but sad that the one thing you essentially built your career around, you hang your hat on, the reason why you've gotten to where you've gotten to, is the one thing that's kind of, like, completely let you down.
"The one thing I can wake up out of bed and naturally go do is, like, the one thing I have to work the hardest on. I always worked hard, but this part kind of came a little bit more natural, whereas shortstop was something that was manufactured. Now, it's almost the opposite."
It is not the first time he has dealt with lows in his professional career. One time in low-A, the multitalented athlete nearly quit the game. Betts, a 2011 fifth-round pick, was hitting under .150 more than a month into the 2013 minor-league season when he thought about returning to school. He planned to take the ACT early on a Saturday morning, but he ended up rescheduling when his game the night prior went late into the night. That decision was prudent; he went on a tear the rest of the season and was in the big leagues a year later.
Since then, cold stretches would come and go, but he always found his way out. The 12-year veteran has never finished a big-league season with an OPS under .800.
Barring a dramatic turnaround, though, that will change this year.
He currently has an OPS of .684. He had hit 45% better than league average over the course of his first four seasons with the Dodgers; this year, he is batting below league average for a second-place Dodgers team that has yet to play to its massive potential.
"He's going to be OK," teammate Freddie Freeman said confidently. "I don't know how to say it other than Mookie Betts is going to be Mookie Betts, and not one person in blue is worried about anything or anyone on our team."
Betts' expected stats are better than what he has actually produced, suggesting some unluckiness in the down year. His chase rate is up slightly from the norm, though still well above league average. His strikeout and whiff rates remain among the game's best.
He's just not generating as much force as usual.
His barrel and walk rates are both down, and his hard-hit rate is the lowest of his career. He still does not attribute the physical toll of playing shortstop as the reason for his offensive shortcomings, viewing the two sides of the ball as "completely different."
"Those are excuses," Betts said. "I don't like excuses."
Those around him maintain their belief.
"We all have Mook's back, we know he's working hard," Clayton Kershaw said. "He gets going, this lineup will get scary really fast."
Roberts insists he will not move Betts down from the No. 2 spot in the order. Betts' lockermate, Freeman, reminds him not to take criticism from anyone he wouldn't seek advice from.
"Like I told him two weeks ago, I said, 'You're Mookie Betts, it's going to be fine. You're one of the greatest players of this generation.'" Freeman said. "It's more of just trying to harp on, 'Stay with the process, don't chase.' Because when you're going through it, you want to get results."
Betts had tried anything — everything — to find those results.
He thought back to what worked when he was first coming up in Boston. In 2018, he built a quick friendship with J.D. Martinez when the two first became teammates. They had a similar passion for the game, and Betts appreciated the way Martinez thought about hitting. Even when they were no longer playing together, Betts would continue to send Martinez video of his swing to analyze.
So it wasn't all that surprising earlier this month when Martinez, who is currently a free agent, decided to check in with his friend. Martinez met with Betts when the Dodgers traveled to Tampa and worked with his former teammate in the cage, as they had done so often before. But there was no immediate fix; Betts went hitless that series and eventually found himself mired in a career-worst 0-for-22 rut.
"I didn't know where to go," Betts recalled. "Usually your outs can kind of guide you, especially if you're in the right realm or whatever. On the outside, I was thinking, like, 'I don't know how to fix it.' If that was my son, I would tell him, 'I don't know how to help you with that.' That's kind of where I was."
He continued to seek advice from those he trusted.
"I would say probably two weeks in a row, he would come to my locker and just show me video of him hitting and what he's working on and ask me my thoughts of what he thinks I think is wrong," Freeman said.
The veteran first baseman didn't want to proactively approach Betts to offer more ideas, knowing how many people were already in his teammate's ear.
But when Betts came to him for input, Freeman offered it.
"My whole thing for him hitting was his shoulders," Freeman said. "His shoulders were tilted up too much for me. When he was swinging, his left shoulder was higher than his right."
Over the last couple of weeks, when Betts would look into the on-deck circle, Freeman would make a motion to try to remind him to keep his shoulders down.
"If your shoulders are down a little bit," Freeman reasoned, "everything else will work in line."
Lately, Betts is showing signs of life at the plate.
When the Dodgers returned from Tampa on Aug. 4, the home crowd rose to its feet to try to encourage Betts, giving him a standing ovation in his first at-bat against the Cardinals. He went hitless that day but responded the following game with three hits, including a double. He doubled again in the series finale, then homered for the first time in more than a month to begin the series against the Blue Jays.
"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 said. "So, when he is out in front, he drives it in the air, not on the ground on the pull side."
Over his last eight games, Betts has more hits (14) than he had in his previous 21 games (13). Over his last six games, he has knocked in as many runs (seven) as he had in his previous 29 games.
Betts admits this stretch is encouraging, though he's careful not to say he's out of the woods yet, knowing how many times he felt he was on the right track only to then fall into another rut.
But in a season that for so long left him searching for answers, he seems to have a better feel for what he needs to do to produce.
"Obviously there's a mechanical piece that is real, that he feels something," Roberts said. "But I think for me, from my vantage point, I think there's a lot more confidence, conviction in the swings. When the ball's in the hitting zone, he's squaring it up."
This week, Freeman also noted an encouraging sign.
Those meetings at his locker have stopped: "That must mean he's feeling good."
Rowan Kavner is an MLB writer for FOX Sports. He previously covered the L.A. Dodgers, LA Clippers and Dallas Cowboys. An LSU grad, Rowan was born in California, grew up in Texas, then moved back to the West Coast in 2014. Follow him on X at @RowanKavner.