Hey, if you’re in the Kansas City area, come on out to the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum on Saturday for the Hall of Game extravaganza. The museum is honoring some awesome players — Reggie Smith, Sarge Matthews, Ralph Garr and Andre Thornton! I’ll be there along with a bunch of other cool people, including Dusty Baker!
LOS ANGELES — To be honest, I was a little worried about Mookie Betts. I was worried the way an uncle might be worried about a favorite nephew, you know — not so much worried that he was struggling on the field, but worried that he was unhappy. I know that’s silly. Fandom can be silly.
Most of the time, I root for my favorite players, my favorite teams, to play well.
With Mookie, for some reason, I root for his happiness.*
*I just got a call from an unknown number in the UK.
“Is this Noah?” the voice on the other end said.
“No,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“What are you bloody apologizing for? It’s my fault,” the voice responded.
I guess it’s this: Mookie deserves to be happy. The man’s pure sunshine. His full name is Markus Lynn Betts because his parents wanted his initials to be MLB, and everybody calls him Mookie, and he’s an athletic genius who is basically my height, and he’s a bowling prodigy at a time when the world doesn’t appreciate bowling prodigies. He’s learning to play the guitar, which no doubt means he’ll soon be Jimi Hendrix or Duane Allman or Brad Paisley or Bo Diddley, depending on which way his musical tastes take him.
Here’s Blink-182’s Mark Hoppus showing the Dodger guitar he’d had made special for Mookie … and yes, that is Molly Knight in front, getting the much better photo.
The last two years or so, Mookie has quote-unquote “struggled” on the field. It feels absurd to use that word “struggle” for a player who posted a five WAR season last year, but we’re measuring things on the Mookie scale, and this is a guy who has led the league in WAR three times, including a 2018 season that might just be the most perfect season for any player this century.*
*Wouldn’t be surprised to see Mookie’s 2018 season among the FIFTY SEASONS in that book coming out in February.
Anyway, Mookie’s five-WAR season last year — and his four-WAR season most of this campaign — was powered more by his extraordinary versatility than his pure Hall of Fame greatness. He was a league-average hitter in 2025 and a below-league-average hitter for much of this season. That’s not Mookie. Sure, because the Dodgers were in desperate straits, he moved to shortstop for the first time since he was in low-A ball, and because he’s Mookie, he made himself into one of the game’s best defensive shortstops — we still don’t talk enough about how absurd that all is.
That defense at shortstop, along with his baseball intelligence and his 20-plus-homer power, makes him a valuable player. But he hasn’t been a GREAT player, and the world is a better place when Mookie Betts is a GREAT player.
And I’ve been worried that Mookie, who turns 34 in two weeks, would never be a GREAT player again.
That idea makes me sad. Sure, I know that no one, not even Mookie, is immune to the unforgiving whims of time. In a lifetime of watching ball, I’ve seen all my favorite greats — George Brett, Tony Gwynn, Ozzie Smith, Dale Murphy, Greg Maddux, Ichiro Suzuki, Zack Greinke, Joey Votto — grow old even as I have stayed 10 years old. This is the deal we make with the universe when we become baseball fans.
And I know this is where it all leads for Mookie Betts.
But I’m not ready for it yet. And more, I sense that Mookie himself is not ready for the decline. I think we all know that Mookie is impossibly hard on himself. He demands perfection from an imperfect sport. So, yes, I suspect that these last couple of seasons have been rough on him. He’s been injured. He’s been sick. And he’s had all-encompassing slumps where it looked like he wouldn’t ever get another hit.
BUT … the last six weeks, Mookie has been Mookie again, and it’s glorious. The last six or so weeks — going back to August 11 — Betts has hit .327/.415/.597 with 13 doubles and nine homers in 38 games. That’s vintage Mookie Betts.
But more than that, to my eyes, he’s just looked a lot more like his radiant self. I mean, sure, he’s slowed down both literally (he’s now bottom third in sprint speed; his bat speed, never his strong suit, is among the league’s slowest for everyday players) and figuratively. But that glow is back. He’s battling every at-bat. He refuses to strike out. In the last week, he’s had four three-hit games (one of them a four-hit game), and he banged out two home runs in one of them.
And it just makes me so happy to have him back, even for a short while. Having watched the Dodgers the last couple of days, they look vulnerable to me; they really do. Obviously, they’re playing out the string; none of this stuff matters much — they have already clinched the division and a first-round bye — and so they’re just trying to stay sharp. But they didn’t look sharp at all to me. On Wednesday, they were pretty awful. Base-running blunders.* Defensive mishaps. Yoshi Yamamoto was fine, but he didn’t look like the unhittable Game 1 ace that the Dodgers really need him to be. And on Thursday, the lineup — after the top three hitters — went hitless and barely managed a ball out of the infield.
*Early in the game, as I mentioned in Thursday’s post, Teoscar Hernandez tried to stretch a single into a double and was WAY out … and then he was entirely spooked for the rest of the game. The next time he got on base, someone hit a single, and he read it so badly — he basically stopped halfway to second — that he barely made it. Then came a looping single, and he was so nervous about getting caught that he was almost thrown out at third. It’s quite a thing to see the human side of baseball.
So the Dodgers, for all their stars and all the money spent, really need Mookie to be Mookie. He knows that. I’m sure he feels it in his soul. I’m not rooting for the Dodgers this October, not with Milwaukee (and San Diego) in the mix for their first World Series title. But I am rooting, like always, for Mookie. The man is a great hugger. He deserves all the best in life.
My friend Dan pointed this out to me, and it’s kind of hard to believe: The entire Philadelphia Phillies lineup — all of them combined — has six WAR. I knew the Phillies were near the bottom of the league in runs scored. I knew that they were below average defensively. But SIX WAR?
Put it this way: Bryce Harper has 3.3 WAR. He leads the league in walks.
Kyle Schwarber has 2.6 WAR. He leads the league in home runs.
The rest of the team, all of them, are replacement level.
I just didn’t appreciate how top-heavy this team is, even as I get plenty of updates about them from our dear friend Linda Holmes. She has lamented how inconsistent her team is, and, yeah, when you basically have two offensive players you can count on even a little bit, you’re going to be inconsistent no matter how good your pitching is.
The good news for Phillies fans is that, as mentioned a couple of days ago, nobody in baseball except Yordan Álvarez and PCA is hitting. This is just one of those seasons where some team might run through the playoffs by throwing a whole bunch of shutouts … and the Phillies are about as likely to do that as anybody else.
This is only semi-connected, but I love to look back at 2014 and 2015, when the Kansas City Royals improbably won back-to-back pennants. Offense had plummeted, particularly in 2014, when teams only scored 4.07 runs per game, the lowest average since 1972. The Royals caught the wave — they had an unhittable bullpen and a bunch of scrappy hitters who didn’t strike out a lot. They were the right team at the right moment.
I’m not saying the Phillies are the right team for this moment … nobody knows about Jesus Luzardo’s shoulder. BUT if Luzardo is semi-healthy and dealing, yeah, throwing Cris Sanchez, Luzardo, and Zack Wheeler throughout the playoffs and with Jhoan Duran cleaning up, they could be that team.
The Brewers could be that team with their feisty lineup and the Miz.
The Yankees could be that team with Cam Schlittler throwing zeroes* and maybe Aaron Judge doing some Roy Hobbs stuff.*
*Another marvelous find from the marvelous Sarah Langs. Schlittler has had twenty-five starts this year where he’s given up 1-or-0 earned runs. The only pitcher in baseball history who has more starts giving up 1-or-fewer earned runs? Walter Johnson in 1913!
The point is, this postseason really feels wide open. It might not turn out that way, but that’s how it feels now. I’d love more balls in play. I’d love more rallies. I’d love for starting pitchers to go the distance, or at least try. But that’s not the game we have. And the game we have opens up the field, so I’m going to enjoy the heck out of that.
I strange, but when you put in "Mookie", I'm like "Which one?".
As a 62 year old Red Sox fan, both Mookie's have played a big role.
How many zero or one run games did Bob Gibson have in 1968? With a 1.12 ERA, it seems like almost all of his starts must have been zero or one.