Mookie Betts Has Been Starting Things Off With a Bang

Mookie Betts ended June the way he began it, by leading off the Dodgers’ half of the first inning with a homer, then adding another later on as one of his three additional hits. He bookended his month by doing so against the Yankees in Los Angeles on June 2, then against the Royals in Kansas City on June 30. Along the way, he added an additional five homers, boosting his season total to 22 (he hit his 23rd on Tuesday night against the Pirates), and he’s remained hot as July has begun. Not surprisingly, he’ll be the National League’s starting lineup in next week’s All-Star Game.

Betts has been on a leadoff homer binge this season. Just past the midway point, he’s hit nine already, including five in June, and three in an eight-day span as the month ended:

Betts’ total to date ties him for ninth on the single-season leaderboard, though he’s just four homers shy of the record, which was challenged by Jose Altuve last year, when he fell one short:

You’ll note that all but one of those 13 seasons has taken place in the Wild Card era (1995 onward), and over half of them have occurred in what we might call the Statcast era (2015 onward). Those high concentrations have plenty to do with the higher home run rates of recent seasons, and they also owe plenty to teams’ increasing willingness to bat power hitters first. Who doesn’t find the possibility of a quick 1–0 lead tantalizing?

To that end, here’s a comparison covering the last 40 seasons, showing the home run rates of leadoff hitters in all of their plate appearances (not just the game-openers) against the major league-wide rate:

As you can see, it wasn’t really until around 2015 that the two rates started to converge. From 1984 to 2015, the leadoff hitter rate never reached 80% of the full league rate, generally hovering around 60% and only topping 70% half a dozen times. In 2016, it reached 84%, and for every year since ’18 (save for the pandemic-shortened ’20 season), it’s been at least 90%, with a high of 96% in ’21. While the rates for 2020, ’22 and ’23 are goosed a bit by the exclusion of pitchers, interestingly enough, they’re still lower than the pitcher-inclusive rates of 2018 (94%), ’19 (95%), and ’21.

Given that general trend, it shouldn’t be too surprising that the all-time leaderboard for game-opening homers (whether hit by the visiting team or the home team) is heavily tilted toward recent players:

To avoid confusion, I’ve eschewed the term “leadoff” here after muddying the waters above; the “Game-Opening Homers” are from the first plate appearances of the first inning, and the “Batting 1st” are from all plate appearances in that spot. Betts is second to George Springer among the active leaders in the game-openers; sort the table and you’ll see that he’s now second only to Rickey Henderson himself in homers out of the top spot, having passed Alfonso Soriano this year. Notably missing from the latter rankings if you sort are Johnny Damon (163 homers from 1995 to 2012) and Eddie Yost (131 homers from 1946 to ’62), but everybody else in the top 16 is there.

The Dodgers have batted Betts almost exclusively out of the leadoff spot for the past two seasons; he has taken a mere three plate appearances in other spots while coming off the bench and batted somewhere lower than first in just 28 of his 177 games in 2020–21. He hit first for the vast majority of his time in Boston as well, but only in his MVP-winning 2018 season did he hit there more or less exclusively (he had two PA off the bench elsewhere that year).

With his 23 homers in 85 team games, Betts is on pace not only to surpass his career high of 35, set last year, but also to challenge the single-season record of 39 homers out of the top spot, shared by Soriano (2006 with the Cubs) and Springer (2019 with the Astros), and nearly tied last year by Kyle Schwarber (38). He may wind up competing for the record with Ronald Acuña Jr., who has 21 homers out of the leadoff spot himself. Overall, Betts ranks third in the NL in homers behind Matt Olson (28) and Pete Alonso. He’s second in WAR (3.8), albeit a full win behind Acuña, and fourth in both wRC+ (152) and slugging percentage (.560). All told, he’s having a better season even than last year’s 6.5-WAR campaign; his .377 on-base percentage is a 37-point improvement, his slugging percentage a 27-point one, and his wRC+ an eight-point one.

What’s more, Betts has done a more-than-respectable job playing the middle infield. In 139 innings at second base — not only a career high but also more than he logged there from 2016 to ’22 combined — he has 3 DRS, 1 OAA, and 0.7 UZR, and in 89 innings at shortstop, a position he hadn’t played professionally since 2013, he has 1 DRS, 0.1 RAA, and -1 RAA. Given the small samples, you can probably take those measures with a grain of salt, but he certainly hasn’t embarrassed himself at either spot, and at times, he’s looked like a natural.

On the offensive side, Betts has improved in two key areas relative to last year. He’s trimmed his chase rate from a career-high 26% to a career-low 19.3%, mainly by taking more pitches at the bottom of the shadow zone. He’s cut his whiff rate in zones 17, 18, and 19 from 34.4% last year to 22% this year, and he’s spitting on just about any fastball that gets that low, swinging at just eight four-seamers and sinkers in those zones compared to 34 all of last year. That’s helped his walk rate rebound from 8.6%, his lowest since 2016, to a career-high 13.8%.

Betts’ more selective approach has led to better contact. His 92.6 mph average exit velocity represents a 2.1-mph increase on last year’s average and places him in the 92nd percentile. His 12.5% barrel rate is nearly three points ahead of last year, and his 48.6% hard-hit rate is nearly four points ahead; both are the second-best marks of his career behind only his 2018 numbers and place him in the 81st and 85th percentiles. His .560 xSLG is 95 points higher than last year, and his .405 xwOBA is 61 points higher; they place him in the 86th and 97th percentiles, respectively. He’s not exactly Aaron Judge, but he’s pounding the ball.

As noted, Betts has 3.8 fWAR and also 3.9 bWAR, which puts him 0.1 short of matching his seventh-best season; in other words, he’s about to start padding his peak WAR score. Another 1.5 bWAR would give him 61.6 career and 51.9 peak, as well as 56.8 JAWS, a hair above the standard for Hall right fielders — and that’s while still in just his 10th season.

If there’s one cautionary note regarding Betts’ play this year, it’s in the outfield; where his metrics were very good last year (15 DRS, 12.8 UZR, 3 RAA), they’re merely average this year, albeit in just 472.2 innings. His outfield jump percentile has fallen from the 80th to the 53rd, and his sprint speed is in the 47th percentile, his third year in the middle after six years in the 70s or above.

All of that may reflect aging, or the cost of his part-time work in the infield, but it could also be Betts dialing back his intensity as a matter of self-preservation. He played in a total of 264 games in 2021–22, making trips to the injured list for right hip inflammation and a rib fracture, and at times was pretty banged up even while in the lineup. This year, he’s played in all but three of the Dodgers’ games, and two of those were due to his paternity leave in April. On a team in a dogfight for the NL West title and that has more weak spots in the lineup than usual, that’s made quite a difference. Acuña is clearly the odds-on favorite to win the NL MVP award right now, but Betts may well wind up in the conversation come ballot season.