Mookie Betts spent the first two months of the season banging his head against a wall, trying to figure out what was wrong with his swing.
Walking into a wall might have worked better.
Since suffering a fractured toe during a middle-of-the-night mishap, Betts has put up numbers more like he expects from himself – a .351 batting average (13 for 31) and a .901 OPS in nine games since missing four games with the injury.
Before that … well, Betts offers his typically harsh self-assessment.
“Garbage,” he said of the .254 average and .742 OPS glaring down at him from the scoreboard before his injury.
“I believe I can be better than that. I believe in my abilities and my process. I felt like I was doing the right work but it wasn’t really translating. … It’s just hard. It’s hard to know you were somebody and you’re giving it everything you’ve got and it’s not showing up. It’s hard to look at. I don’t care who you are.”
Betts’ fractured toe gave him a chance to look for answers without having to put them to the immediate test of a game each night. He went to “the lab,” studying video without spending a lot of time in the batting cage.
Hitting coach Robert Van Scoyoc said it was “the normal process – we went through his video, compared it to when he was doing well, came up with some drills to address it.”
What they found were familiar issues that come up with Betts’ swing – “the way his hands load and the bat position is always important for the way his swing works,” Van Scoyoc said.
“There’s always little things that pop up. It was kind of the stuff that’s normal for him,” Van Scoyoc said.
Betts didn’t feel it was normal. He thinks it all started with the virus that he caught this spring, causing him to lose 20 pounds. He thinks he picked up some “bad habits” at the plate, trying to compensate for “being weak.”
“I had to figure out how to attack them,” he said. “Before, I wasn’t really attacking the right areas. I was trying. I thought I was but it wasn’t really registering. I think the time off gave my body enough time off to stack some positive days and not think I was doing something right, go test it in the game and go get out a couple times and think that what progression you made is null and void.
“I was trying to swing harder with my upper body instead of still using the ground and just understanding that at 160 pounds I’m not going to be able to use the ground the same way I do at 180, 175.”
Van Scoyoc described it as “staying connected, making sure his hips initiate his swing.”
All of that is the typical under-the-hood work a slumping player does. Betts is not a typical player. He is a former league MVP with a batting title, six Gold Gloves and seven Silver Slugger awards on a Hall of Fame track at age 32.
Those accomplishments do not insulate him from wondering if the first two months of this season were not just a slump but a sign that he could no longer do what he had before.
“Yeah, definitely there’s doubt,” he said. “The game is moving. The game is moving and if you don’t keep moving with it you’ll get left behind. Look, man – I’ve never been the fastest on the field, I’ve never been the biggest on the field, I’ve never been the strongest on the field. I am literally average across the board in all facets of the game. I have to rely on a lot of things in my process to be perfect. That’s just the way it is.
“I don’t have a superpower to fall back on. I’m not those guys. I don’t have those things to fall back on. So it really has to be right, my process has to be right. You might say, ‘Oh, your hand-eye coordination.’ Everybody’s hand-eye coordination here is good – elite at this level. That doesn’t set you apart. It’s got to be something. So I feel like mine is my process and my hard work. That’s really the only thing I can control. I can’t make myself bigger or stronger or all those other things.”
Van Scoyoc almost rolls his eyes when told of Betts’ estimate of his skill set.
“He might sell himself short on the list of super powers,” Van Scoyoc said. “He’s not the biggest guy but he makes contact, he’s efficient, he hits the ball at good angles – there’s a lot of things he does really, really good. I think he might be selling himself a bit short.
“I think he just got behind the 8-ball early with the sickness. He’s really hard on himself when he’s not performing which makes it harder. I think he’s just working through it and heating up.”
If hard work truly is his superpower, Betts has put it to use in making the switch to shortstop this season. The focus and energy he has put into that has allowed him to make himself into “a major-league shortstop on a championship club,” by Manager Dave Roberts’ recent estimate. All involved dismissed the idea that it has also drained away some of his offensive production.
Whether it is the adjustments he made during his downtime or just the downtime itself, Betts said he has more “clarity” when he steps up to the plate now.
“I definitely feel like I’m in a better spot,” he said, his average now up to .269 and his OPS at .766 (both would still represent career-lows). “It’s just continuing to stack positive days. When you do go 0 for 4 or whatever or hit a little rut, it’s important that I believe in my process and keep stacking good days.”
UP NEXT
Giants (RHP Logan Webb, 5-5, 2.58 ERA) at Dodgers (RHP Yoshinobu Yamamoto, 6-4, 2.20 ERA), Friday, 7:10 p.m., SportsNet LA, 570 AM