Mookie Betts Is a Star Shortstop Now

Though he’s only 32 years old and in his 12th major league season, Mookie Betts has already done enough to secure a spot in the Hall of Fame. He’s made eight All-Star teams, won six Gold Gloves as a right fielder, taken home an MVP award while finishing second three times, and helped his teams to three championships. (He’s the only active position player with three rings) He already ranks eighth among right fielders in JAWS, and is fourth in seven-year peak score, behind only Babe Ruth, Stan Musial, and Henry Aaron. Like all the great ones, he’s hardly content to rest on his laurels. Not only is he in the midst of his third straight season making substantial contributions to the Dodgers’ middle infield, but he’s emerged as a star-caliber shortstop in a mid-career move that lacks a modern parallel.

“For me he’s a grade and a half better at that position than he was last year,” said Dodgers manager Dave Roberts over Memorial Day Weekend, during the team’s trip to Citi Field. “He looks like a major league shortstop now, where last year there were times I didn’t feel that way. But I think he’s a guy that loves a challenge and he’s really realized that challenge and keeps getting better each night.”

Asked to elaborate on what has changed for Betts, Roberts said, “Repetitions, confidence, he’s had a lot of different plays that he’s been able to see in games — but I think [the biggest difference] is confidence. He’s just a better defender right now.”

For Roberts, Betts’ first step is where he really shines. “I think his ability to get off on the ball is as good as anybody in baseball,” the manager said late last month.

Betts isn’t a complete newcomer to shortstop. He starred at the position at Overton High School in Nashville and was drafted as a shortstop by the Red Sox in 2011. Professionally, however, his résumé at the position was a thin one until recently. He played six innings at short during his professional debut in the Gulf Coast League in 2011, another 13 games there (as well as 58 at second base) at Low-A Lowell the next season, and made a two-inning cameo in the Arizona Fall League in 2013. But he wasn’t long for the middle infield. He played 46 games at the keystone in the minors in 2014, then 14 for the Red Sox that year after Dustin Pedroia suffered a season-ending injury. While starring for Boston and Los Angeles in right field, Betts added just 15 more appearances at second base from 2015 to ’22, some of them only for a few innings.

Fast-forward to February 2023. After Trea Turner departed the Dodgers via free agency, the team planned for Gavin Lux to take over the position, but Lux tore his right ACL during a February 28 spring training contest. Betts suddenly reentered the middle-infield picture. He dabbled at second base while prospect Miguel Vargas tried to get a foothold, and by the end of April had not only made six starts there, but also four at shortstop when a hamstring strain sidelined Miguel Rojas, Lux’s replacement. By the All-Star break, Betts had started 54 games in right field, 19 at second, and 12 at short, providing impressive defense considering how long it had been since he’d played on the dirt. Vargas’ offensive struggles led the Dodgers to demote him to Triple-A Oklahoma City after the first half of the season. Roberts briefly tried deadline acquisition Amed Rosario at both middle infield spots, but settled on generally using Betts as part of a multi-position platoon. Against lefties, Betts started in right field with Rosario at second, while against righties Betts started at second with the resurgent Jason Heyward in right; Rojas handled short against both. Betts finished with 77 starts in right and 62 at second, plus the 12 at short, a versatility that enhanced his MVP case, though he lost to Ronald Acuña Jr. in the year of his unprecedented combination of 41 homers and 73 steals.

During the 2023 Winter Meetings, Roberts revealed the Dodgers planned to keep Betts as their everyday second baseman in ’24, with Lux at shortstop and Rojas as a backup, but when Lux struggled with his throws early in spring training, the two switched positions. Betts looked like a natural at times, showing off good range, but he was clearly stretched, particularly when it came to his throws. After he landed on the injured list in mid-June due to a fractured left hand, the Dodgers went forward with Rojas and deadline acquisition Tommy Edman at shortstop, returning Betts to right field once his hand healed.

The Dodgers did nothing less than win their second World Series with Betts as their right fielder, but Betts couldn’t let the situation rest. Even when he’d agreed to move back to right field last summer, he told Chris Woodward (at that point a special assistant and roving infield instructor, now a coach) with regards to his attempt to play shortstop. “For now it’s over, but we’re going to win the World Series, and then I’m coming back.”

Betts spent the winter working to improve at shortstop, a luxury he did not have during the winter of 2023–24. From ESPN’s Alden González:

From November to February, Betts visited high school and collegiate infields throughout the L.A. area on an almost daily basis in an effort to solidify the details of a transition he did not have time to truly prepare for last season.

Pedro Montero, one of the Dodgers’ video coordinators, placed an iPad onto a tripod and aimed its camera in Betts’ direction while he repeatedly pelted baseballs into the ground with a fungo bat, then sent Woodward the clips to review from his home in Arizona. The three spoke almost daily.

Betts additionally communicated with and worked out with Rojas, who instilled the need to use different arm slots — plural — from what Betts was used to in right field. “He’s understanding now that you need a slot to throw the ball to first base, you need a slot to throw the ball to second base, you need a slot to throw the ball home and from the side,” Rojas told The Athletic’s Fabian Ardaya in March.

Betts’ season began inauspiciously. Shortly before the Dodgers departed for their season-opening Tokyo Series in Japan, he contracted a mystery illness that not only sidelined him for those two games against the Cubs, but prevented him from eating full meals and caused him to lose 23 pounds, no small matter for a 175-pound athlete. His offense has suffered, with a drop in wRC+ from 141 last year to 110 this year, but he’s shown notable improvement in the field.

Betts has started 68 of the Dodgers’ 76 games at shortstop, playing 583 innings there (52 2/3 more than last year) without logging a single inning at another position. While that still constitutes a modest sample, multiple metrics paint a compelling picture that illustrates his improvement. First, some old-school statistics:

Once upon a time, all we had to go on for defensive numbers were putouts, assists, errors, and fielding percentage. Those figures are much less useful now, but it’s worth noting the distinction between errors made while fielding the ball (E_field) and those made while throwing (E_throw). Betts has been consistently sure-handed, but after making eight throwing errors last year, he’s cut that down to two thus far, in slightly more playing time. On the other hand, he’s making fewer plays (putouts plus assists) per game, both relative to his own work last year (RF/9, for range factor per nine innings) and to the league (lgRF/9). He’s swung from besting the league average by 0.18 plays per nine to falling short by 0.1 plays per nine.

What’s missing from that comparison is opportunity. According to Baseball Reference, the share of right-handed batters the Dodgers have faced with Betts at shortstop — which is to say batters more inclined to pull the ball to the left side of the infield — has dropped from 59% in 2024 to 54% this year, while the league average has dropped from 59% to 56%. Meanwhile, the share of batters producing groundballs against Dodgers pitchers with Betts at shortstop has dropped from 29% to 27%, while the league average has remained at 29% in both years. Even without a formula to make an exact adjustment for Betts’ comparatively limited opportunities, the difference probably comes out in the wash.

Tuning to advanced stats, while the Defensive Runs Saved values we publish at FanGraphs match those at Baseball Reference and Fielding Bible, those sites offer more detailed breakdowns that are useful when peeking under the hood. For one thing, Fielding Bible offers directional breakdowns à la Statcast’s Outs Above Average system (which I’ll get to next). For another, the system separately accounts for a defender’s runs value in three categories: Air (pretty negligible for infielders, with all but a few within one run of average), Range, and Throwing, as part of what Sports Info Solutions calls the PART system with Positioning (the P in PART) credited to the team and not the individual player. Note that the run values are presented as whole numbers, just as in Statcast, while the decimals are hidden, which explains why the displayed figures don’t appear to add up:

GFP stands for Good Fielding Plays, which Fielding Bible describes as plays “when a fielder does something to record an out or prevent a base advancement that we wouldn’t typically expect from a fielder at the position.” (There are apparently about 30 types.) Betts has already surpassed last year’s total of those while cutting down on Defensive Misplays (DM), any play of roughly 60 types “where the fielder screws up but isn’t actually charged with an error,” resulting in either a batter reaching base or advancing an extra base, such as a bobbled ball on a double play opportunity or a ball hit right past an infielder. According to Sports Info Solutions’ Mark Simon, on grounders Betts has reduced his combined total of DM and errors from six last year to two this year, while on throws he’s cut his DM plus errors from nine to three.

Going by the DRS directional components — which account for both range and throwing — Betts has improved greatly on plays made to his right (toward third base) and straight ahead relative to last year, but hasn’t been as good on plays to his left (toward first base). On throwing alone, he’s improved by eight runs from year to year, which jibes with his reduced number of throwing errors. Adding up all the air, range, and throwing categories, Betts has improved from 3 DRS (tied for 18th in the majors, trailing many players with hundreds more innings) to 7 DRS (tied with Nick Allen and Zach Neto for third in the majors, behind only Taylor Walls and Jeremy Peña).

Finally, Statcast provides another rich trove of data.

The OAA (Outs Above Average) figures are broken into directional components: in, back, lateral toward third base and lateral toward first base. According to Statcast, Betts’ strength last year was his ability to make plays in the shortstop-third base hole. He’s surpassed last year’s OAA in that direction while also posting net improvements of three outs on plays to his left, and six outs on balls in front of him. Those directional measures clash with the DRS ones, but it’s fair to wonder if the discrepancies owe anything to what’s captured by that system’s Positioning component. Based upon Statcast’s estimates, Betts is converting about 2% more plays into outs than the average major league shortstop, compared to 2% fewer than average last year.

Statcast doesn’t break out run values for infielder throwing as it does for outfielders, but it does measure arm strength in the form of average velocity on the top 5% of a player’s throws. By that measure, Betts’ average top-5% throw has improved from 78.3 mph to 81.8 mph. That extra mustard still places him just 24th out of 36 qualifying shortstops, 3.7 mph below the major league average (Gabriel Arias and Elly De La Cruz rank first and second, with 91.9 mph and 91.7 mph, respectively). Looking back, Betts was 59th out of 60 last year, 8.6 mph below average. Progress!

Boiling it down, across similar sample sizes Betts has improved by four runs according to DRS and by seven runs according to FRV. Not only is he tied for third in the majors in the former, he’s tied for fourth in the latter, which would be impressive even if he were a seasoned veteran. Here’s how he stacks up alongside the active Gold Glove winners still playing shortstop:

This isn’t to suggest Betts is worthy of a Gold Glove, but he’s not out of place with these admittedly noisy partial-season metrics — and that’s as the oldest member of the group! Which brings us back to the uniqueness of this feat. In April, Zach Crizer searched for precedents to what Betts is attempting:

Only 11 players on record have become primary shortstops for the first time in their fifth major-league season or after. And Betts is only the second to make that jump from the outfield. The first was Howie Shanks of the 1917 Washington Senators (aka Grifs). Shanks was less productive in his 14-season career than Betts was in 2023.

A closer parallel, in terms of prominence, might be Gil McDougald. A sterling infielder on the star-studded 1950s New York Yankees, he won AL Rookie of the Year, made an All-Star team and twice received MVP votes playing a mix of second and third base before he was asked to try shortstop to succeed Phil Rizzuto.

… He spent two seasons as the primary shortstop, earning top-10 MVP finishes both years, before pivoting back to second base. More recently, the Baltimore Orioles and Dodgers gave superlative third base defender Manny Machado a season of run at shortstop as he approached free agency. It turned out to be a one-year experiment.

Machado, another player likely to wind up in Cooperstown, played shortstop almost exclusively in the Orioles’ chain, but upon reaching Baltimore, he was bumped to third base by three-time Gold Glove winner J.J. Hardy. He won Gold Gloves at the hot corner in 2013 and ’15, and played short when Hardy was injured in ’15 and ’16. Over a combined 433 innings at shortstop in those two seasons, he netted 3 DRS, and had 2 FRV in 380 innings in 2016, the first season for which that metric is available. The Orioles gave him a longer run at short in 2018 following Hardy’s retirement; in a total of 147 games and 1,261 innings with Orioles and Dodgers (after a deadline blockbuster), he managed 2 FRV but -10 DRS. Filling in for the injured rookie Fernando Tatis Jr. in 2019, both players’ first season with the Padres, Machado again scuffled (-1 FRV and -4 DRS in 299 innings). He hasn’t played shortstop since.

ESPN’s González offered another parallel in the outfield-to-shortstop sweepstakes:

Only 21 players since 1900 have registered 100 career games in right field and 100 career games at shortstop, according to ESPN Research. It’s a list compiled mostly of lifelong utility men. The only one among them who came close to following Betts’ path might have been Tony Womack, an every-day right fielder in his age-29 season and an every-day shortstop in the three years that followed. But Womack had logged plenty of professional shortstop experience before then.

The light-hitting Womack, who debuted in 1993, played shortstop for the Diamondbacks from 2000–02, the last three years before DRS became available. By the less sophisticated Total Zone, he netted out as average across 410 games at shortstop, but so weak was his bat (71 wRC+) that he totaled just 2.1 bWAR and 1.7 fWAR for those three seasons, with highs of 1.4 bWAR and 1.0 fWAR for the 2001 World Series winners.

Even if we only consider players who logged 100 games at both shortstop and in the outfield in their careers, regardless of sequence, Betts is in rarefied air:

Wagner and Davis debuted in the 19th Century and starred at shortstop but moved around the diamond a fair bit. Wagner, one of the original five Hall of Fame inductees, played more outfield and third base than shortstop early in his career; he didn’t play more than 61 games at short in a season until 1903, his age-29 campaign. Davis broke in as an outfielder with the Cleveland Spiders (!) at age 19 in 1890 and played mostly third base from 1892-96 before becoming a regular shortstop for the Giants in ’97, beginning an 11-year run at the position. Yount moved from shortstop to center field (with a brief detour to left) in his age-29 season and at age 33 became just the third player to win an MVP award at multiple positions, after Hank Greenberg and Musial, both of whom did so as outfielders and first basemen. Ward was a 19th Century pitcher who played the outfield when he wasn’t on the mound, then after an arm injury moved to shortstop in 1885, at age 25. Irvin was a Negro Leagues star who only played a plurality of games at shortstop in 1941 (at age 22), ’46, and ’47 before becoming an early integration pioneer with the Giants. Phillips was the proto-Zobrist, able to handle any one of several positions on a given day or season. Marte mainly played shortstop in his first three seasons in the majors (2015–17) with the Mariners and Diamondbacks. He’s since made two All-Star teams, one as a center fielder (2019, age 25) and one as a second baseman (2024, age 30).

Those are some great players, but at best they’re distant parallels or imperfect analogues to Betts. By his own account and those of Roberts, Woodward and others, he’s far from a finished product, but he’s doing something we’ve never quite seen, and it’s a sight to behold.