SAN DIEGO — On Tuesday night, one of Major League Baseball’s best home-field advantages was fulfilling its reputation. Every Game 3 miscue from the Dodgers seemed to invite another. It felt like Petco Park was suffocating the opponent. Twenty-four hours later, another record crowd filled the seats, expecting to continue the celebration. One win away from slaying the dragon to the north again in the National League Division Series, Padres fans were ready to party like it was 2022.
Instead, they were never given a reason.
Mookie Betts helped make sure of it, emerging from his postseason doldrums and finding his self-belief again in an 8-0 win that saved the Dodgers’ season.
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“My teammates did an amazing job trying to put confidence, instill confidence in me,” Betts said. “I had to turn off all social media because that was all negative, and I had to get some positive vibes in me.”
Lately, they had been hard to come by.
Betts entered this week hitless in his past 22 postseason at-bats and 2-for-31 dating back to the start of the 2022 NLDS. In that time, the Dodgers were 2-7 in playoff games.
In the midst of the drought, Betts’ teammates tried to keep his spirits up. To remind the eight-time All-Star of who he is.
“Mook’s our guy,” Max Muncy said. “He’s one of our leaders. He’s still one of the best players in baseball. I know he gets a little bit overshadowed because we’ve got Shohei Ohtani, but [Betts] is still getting paid $400 million, too. He is one of the best players in baseball, and he’s been one of the best players in the postseason. I know his last two years haven’t shown that, but I mean, c’mon, look at what he’s done in the past. He can still do it.”
In 2018, Betts helped guide the Red Sox to a World Series championship in an MVP season. Two years later, in his first week with the Dodgers, on the first day of full-squad spring training workouts, Betts challenged his new teammates to be more accountable for their effort and to treat every practice rep like it was the World Series. The speech set the tone for another championship season.
During the Dodgers’ 2020 short-season title run, Betts had an .871 playoff OPS in the playoffs and tallied four extra-base hits in the World Series, including a home run in the deciding Game 6. The following year, he hit .458 in the NLDS against the Giants and finished the series with a four-hit performance in a do-or-die Game 5 that helped propel the Dodgers forward. Their road ended against the Braves in the National League Championship Series, where Betts’ struggles began.
By the time he stepped to the plate in San Diego this week, Betts was in the midst of a 3-for-44 playoff slump. Nobody had to remind him.
“I know it’s there,” Betts said.
Manager Dave Roberts could tell it was starting to seep into Betts’ psyche at the plate.
“It’s up to all of us to make sure that he’s in a good headspace to go out there and compete and not get too worried about each particular at-bat,” Roberts said.
Muncy, and others, have tried to play their part.
“When they walk Sho to pitch to him, when he gets a big hit, I tell him, I say, ‘Hey, you get paid $400 [million] too, bro,'” Muncy said. “‘You’re getting paid $400 [million] too. You’re still one of the best players.’ Sometimes, you’ve just got to get reminded of it.”
For a few seconds Sunday at Dodger Stadium, Betts appeared to turn a corner.
In the first inning of Game 2, he lifted a deep drive that carried 354 feet to left field. It would have been a home run in 19 ballparks. Fooled by Jurickson Profar’s histrionics, it was not until Betts was halfway between second and third base that he realized Profar had secured the catch. Betts would go hitless the rest of the night and take his skid with him to San Diego.
Determined to work his way out of the slump, Betts celebrated his 32nd birthday on Monday in a batting cage, swinging hundreds and hundreds of times in San Diego on the Dodgers’ workout day before Game 3.
“You guys just see that,” Muncy said. “We’ve seen the last month. That’s been the work and the preparation he’s had every single day.”
He hit inside. He hit outside. Rather than take time away from the grind to try to clear his head, Betts thought the only way out was through. If he turned his brain off, Betts figured, his struggles would only get worse.
“I’ve seen him take swings where it looks great to me, and for whatever reason he just says it doesn’t feel the way it should,” Tommy Edman said. “But, he’s just got a high standard for what his swing should feel like. He’s one of the hardest workers I’ve played with.”
So, Betts continued tinkering, trying to find the right feel.
Swing after swing after swing.
“I don’t care about overdoing it,” Betts said. “I’d rather overdo it than not give effort. Pretty much as soon as I get to the park, I’m in the cage, and I don’t leave until I go back on the field. And I come back inside, and I hit some more. That’s what I’ve been doing.”
On Tuesday, the work finally yielded production.
Given what had preceded Game 3, you couldn’t blame him for being incredulous when he finally broke out.
In the first inning of the first game after the best catch of Profar’s life, Betts provided another opportunity for a robbery. It looked like a replica of his swing at Dodger Stadium. Again, Profar reached into the stands, extending his arm over the short wall at Petco Park. Betts was so sure the Padres left fielder had the ball and was trolling again that he began jogging back toward his dugout after rounding first. He was near the pitcher’s mound before he realized Profar didn’t make the play. Betts darted back to the baseline and continued his home run trot.
The game would soon unravel on the Dodgers. A Teoscar Hernández grand slam could not prevent them from being pushed to the brink.
But there was an important silver lining.
“I think I just needed to see one fall, man,” Betts said.
He finished with a two-hit night, then another on Wednesday.
“It’s kind of like a hit here, a hit there, they build that momentum and keep building that momentum over time,” Dodgers hitting coach Aaron Bates said. “He slowly builds it, and it stays for a while.”
In Game 4, Betts went deep in his first at-bat of the game for the second straight day. This time, there was no hesitating on his trot around the bases. Betts got all of a 403-foot blast to left-center.
“If he’s going,” Hernández said, “everybody’s going to follow.”
That’s what took place in Wednesday’s eight-run trouncing. The next inning, Ohtani knocked in a run with an RBI single. Betts followed with another RBI knock. The stars atop the lineup started the day a combined 3-for-4 with three RBI, and Betts had finally found something of a groove.
“He knows who he is,” said reliever Daniel Hudson, who threw a scoreless inning in the Dodgers’ Game 4 shutout. “But this is a really, really hard game, and hitting’s even harder than my side of it. I think sometimes he can be a little bit tough on himself. So, to see him come out these last two games and get some big hits for us, hopefully a little bit of a weight off his shoulders, and he can go out there and just be Mookie.”
Suddenly, hits came in bunches: a Muncy double, a Will Smith two-run homer. By the end of the third inning, the Dodgers led 5-0 and already had more hits than either of the previous two games.
In the process, they removed one of San Diego’s greatest assets.
The “beat L.A.” chants that had just burst with vigor, boosting the Padres through a nail-biting Game 3 victory, suddenly sounded more like a plea. The 2024 Dodgers, with their season on the line, would not fold lifelessly the way they had in their first-round exits the past two years.
On Wednesday, they did not have Miguel Rojas, whose torn adductor forced him out of Game 3 early. They did not have Freddie Freeman, who got a day off for his sprained ankle. (The Dodgers made that call during a team breakfast the morning of Game 4.) They did not have a starting pitcher, either, going to a bullpen game while facing elimination.
But they did have Betts, the six-time Silver Slugger who started to resemble the player who was on an MVP track this season before a broken hand sidelined him for two months.
“I think we all knew Mookie was going to be Mookie,” Freeman said.
Just as important, with the series moving to a winner-take-all matchup Friday in Los Angeles, Betts might have reminded himself, too.
“I think he just needed a couple hits to get it out of his head,” Muncy said. “You’ve seen it the last two nights, he’s been Mookie Betts.”
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 Twitter at @RowanKavner.
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