LOS ANGELES — The comparison almost made Mookie Betts squirm a month ago, after another leadoff home run and another night on which, to borrow his manager’s parlance, Betts made the Dodgers’ offense go as he goes. Betts, the MVP right fielder-turned-utility-star, has a tendency to do it all. Manager Dave Roberts said he “is the modern-day Rickey Henderson,” which is to say instant offense the second he steps into the batter’s box.
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Betts was bashful upon hearing the assessment.
“Rickey is a different breed,” he said.
So too is Betts, especially the version of him that now has something to his name Rickey does not. He’s led off 85 games for the Dodgers this season and launched 10 leadoff homers, joining Bobby Bonds (1973) as the only players in MLB history to hit 10 leadoff home runs before the All-Star Break, according to ESPN Stats & Information.
Betts has 26 home runs overall this season, his most ever in the first half. This comes a year after he set a career-high for a full season with 35. To his own surprise, Betts will take part in the Home Run Derby on Monday night in Seattle.
Mookie Betts' numbers at the All-Star break: .276/.379/.586, .965 OPS, 26 HR, 157 wRC+, 4.3 fWAR (trails only Ronald Acuña Jr. among NL position players)
— Fabian Ardaya (@FabianArdaya) July 9, 2023
It might be the best Betts has ever looked in a Dodgers uniform. It probably is.
“This is the true, authentic version of Mookie,” Roberts said.
For as much as Betts has tried to think of himself as a prototypical leadoff hitter, the type that his 5-foot-9 frame would suggest, he’s learned to embrace who he is.
“You just kind of step back and look, my profile definitely changed,” Betts said last month. The origins trace back to Betts’ MVP campaign in 2018, when the then 25-year-old watched the rest of the game sprout out swing success stories that included his new teammate, J.D. Martinez. Martinez’s work with private instructors Craig Wallenbrock and Robert Van Scoyoc altered his career and led to dual assignments once he inked a five-year, $110 million deal with Boston. Martinez was there to mash and to help work with the Red Sox’s budding superstar.
Martinez, along with Van Scoyoc, “just open(ed) my eyes to being great,” Betts said. He had already tapped into some prolific performance, with consecutive top-10 MVP finishes, but was coming off the worst offensive season of his career (.803 OPS).
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“(He) was learning how his body worked,” said Van Scoyoc, who was hired as the Dodgers’ hitting coach a year later in 2019. “How to optimize himself. … He saw that there were guys that were maximizing themselves and wanted to kind of investigate it.”
Betts had the best year of his career and was brilliant again the next year. The trade to Los Angeles in 2020, which featured a 60-game season and second World Series title, “was a sprint,” Roberts said. Betts’ 2021 was a physical struggle, with him playing through a painful bone spur in his right hip for much of the season. Last season was a year of extremes, with torching stretches and battles of self-doubt that required him to, in his words, “take ownership for sucking.”
Now, this looks to be Betts’ moment.
“He’s kind of at peace with where he’s at in his career … but at the same time, he’s still hungry to be the best player,” Van Scoyoc said.
Betts appears as comfortable as he ever has in Los Angeles, and with himself. He’s found ways to assume the void left — on and off the field — by veteran leaders who departed the roster in recent seasons. As the Dodgers have sorted through options in their infield after the subsequent offseason losses of Corey Seager and Trea Turner (along with Gavin Lux’s spring training injury), they turned to a volunteer in Betts, who had not played shortstop since he was in the Arizona Fall League a decade ago.
“If he wasn’t able or willing to do that, we certainly wouldn’t be in this position right now,” Roberts said.
Betts’ .964 OPS entering the All-Star break is his highest at this point since that MVP campaign in 2018. He’s hitting for more power without sacrificing the rest of his offensive game. Over his last 33 games, he’s hit .320 — while also slugging 15 home runs and producing a 1.155 OPS.
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“He’s just kind of found something,” Van Scoyoc said.
Betts has always been searching. As “a self-made hitter,” as Van Scoyoc called him, Betts is always tweaking. Always trying to find the right feeling at the plate. Always having to remind himself who he is. Battling lingering self-doubt. Right now, he’s in a groove and riding it. For as much as the focus on hard, elevated contact has led to more home runs, those are a byproduct rather than the aim.
“It seems like every swing, he’s barreling up the ball,” Freddie Freeman said. “It’s been that special.”
Twice in the span of as many nights this week, Angels manager Phil Nevin decided it was best just to not pitch to Betts at all. After Betts slugged a pair of home runs to go with a double on Friday night, Nevin raised four fingers in the eighth inning rather than let Betts go for a third. When Betts homered Saturday for his third blast in less than 24 hours, Nevin intentionally walked him again — to load the bases in the second inning of a game that was already snowballing. Freeman followed with a two-run sinking double, which means that Betts propelled the inning without even swinging the bat.
It was his first intentional walk since 2021. Betts hadn’t been intentionally walked in consecutive games since 2018. “It was just pretty cool,” he said. “Been a long time.”
Betts is that kind of threat. Despite his protests, he’s that type of hitter now. The type that has his swing dialed in for power. He’s even doing the Home Run Derby.
“You guys watch my (batting practice),” Betts said with a laugh. “I don’t hit any home runs. But we’ll see what happens.”
(Photo of Mookie Betts: Jayne Kamin-Oncea / USA Today)
Fabian Ardaya is a staff writer covering the Los Angeles Dodgers for The Athletic. He previously spent three seasons covering the crosstown Los Angeles Angels for The Athletic. He graduated from Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication in May 2017 after growing up in a Phoenix-area suburb. Follow Fabian on Twitter @FabianArdaya
