Mookie Betts Is Ridiculous
Mookie Betts is on fire right now. Last night, he led off the bottom of the first with a single, stole second base, and scored. He came back up in the third and lashed a game tying homer, which was also the 1,500th hit of his career — because of course it was. He was the catalyst for the Dodgers’ 5-4 win over the Giants. Also, his average, on-base percentage, and slugging percentage all went down on the night, because he’s just that hot to start the season.
Through eight games, Betts is hitting an outrageous .500/.605/1.167. None of those numbers make sense. He’s on base more often than not. He’s walking twice as often as he strikes out. His isolated power is .667, a number that barely sounds like a baseball statistic.
To be fair, we’ve only played eight games. These numbers won’t hold up over a full season, obviously. He’s on a heater at the moment, and pretty much everything will tail off. But this season-starting rampage is an all-timer. Here are the top five eight-game starts to a season in the Wild Card era:
| Player | Year | AVG | OBP | SLG | OPS | wRC+ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| J.D. Martinez | 2017 | .478 | .647 | 1.261 | 1.908 | 359 |
| Sandy Alomar Jr. | 1997 | .618 | .629 | 1.206 | 1.834 | 387 |
| Adrián González | 2015 | .548 | .622 | 1.194 | 1.815 | 386 |
| Chris Shelton | 2006 | .500 | .529 | 1.281 | 1.811 | 356 |
| Mookie Betts | 2024 | .500 | .605 | 1.167 | 1.772 | 323 |
| Byron Buxton | 2021 | .481 | .548 | 1.185 | 1.734 | 353 |
| Ken Griffey Jr. | 1997 | .467 | .556 | 1.167 | 1.722 | 326 |
| Barry Bonds | 2002 | .391 | .588 | 1.130 | 1.719 | 312 |
| Jim Edmonds | 2003 | .500 | .594 | 1.115 | 1.709 | 353 |
| Larry Walker | 1997 | .471 | .526 | 1.147 | 1.673 | 300 |
Of note, Martinez’s start wasn’t the start of the season; he missed the start of that year with an injury and returned in a blaze of glory. But these are the best performances of the last 30 years, and Betts fits squarely into them. The best seasons of Bonds’ and Walker’s careers started this way. Griffey and Edmonds put up near-peak years after their hot starts. Shelton and Alomar are fun reminders that wow, baseball is wild.
How is Mookie doing it? He’s just doing everything he always does – only more so. First, he’s not chasing bad pitches. That’s just how he always operates. His chase rate is among the lowest in baseball, but it’s not far from his career average. He hasn’t chased a single pitch above the strike zone all year, in fact. Here are all of his swings:
That dense cluster middle-in shows you what he’s trying to do, and it’s working. And it’s not like pitchers just happen to be throwing him a lot of pitches there. He’s swinging frequently where he can do damage and spitting on everything else. Here are his takes, for contrast:
That’s so beautiful. The void right in the center is making me giggle a little bit while I type this. What does the perfect batting eye look like? It looks like those two charts, basically.
Remember last season in the All-Star Game, when he said on microphone that he didn’t know how to take a pull swing? Turns out that he figured it out. Here are the locations of all of his batted balls:
This isn’t quite the most he’s ever pulled the ball in an eight-game span, but it’s surprisingly close. And that’s a great recipe for home run success. Betts doesn’t have the power to smash the ball out to any part of the park. His hardest-hit batted ball this season is only 105.1 mph. He falls squarely into the Paredes zone, which means that he needs to take advantage of park dimensions to leave the yard.
Has he done so? Uh, yep. Betts has hit eight balls 100 mph or harder this year. Five of them have turned into homers, and another produced a ringing double. Seven of those eight balls have been hit in the air; there’s no wasted contact going on at the moment. That’s always been the case with Betts, it’s just even more so right now.
There’s only so much analysis you can do about a streak like this. We’ve all seen Mookie Betts succeed in the past. He’s just doing the same stuff he’s always done, only better. He’s always needed to pull the ball to hit homers. Here, for example, are all of his extra-base hits from 2023:
Here’s the best season of his career so far, his 2018 MVP campaign:
When he’s turning on the ball, he’s capable of hitting it out of any park. Combine that with his masterful sense of the strike zone, and pitchers have nowhere to hide. He has eight walks, nine extra-base hits, and four strikeouts, half of which came last night. What can an opponent do other than marvel?
Oh, yeah: He’s doing all of this while playing shortstop full-time. In an extremely small sample, Statcast thinks he’s an above average defender there. DRS thinks he’s one of the best two defensive shortstops in baseball, behind only Bobby Witt Jr. The result is that in addition to being the most valuable hitter in the game by a mile, our WAR metric, which uses the less optimistic Statcast numbers, still thinks he’s a top-10 defender so far.
This level of performance won’t continue. It can’t continue. He’s as locked in as he’s ever been at the plate – he’s only had better eight-game stretches six times in his illustrious career. He’s “on pace” for 28.3 WAR, which is patently absurd. He won’t keep hitting 61.5% of his batted balls hard, or barreling up 15.4% of them, or hitting homers on a third of his fly balls. No one can stay this hot forever.
All that means is that you should enjoy it while you can. One of the greatest players of the 21st century is producing one of the best stretches of his career. He’s doing it at 31 while learning shortstop on the fly and succeeding at that as well. In 20 years, Betts will be a legend of the game, and we’ll probably still talk about that time he went nuclear to start the season where he became a full-time infielder. It’s just another outstanding achievement in a career full of them.
Ben is a writer at FanGraphs. He can be found on Bluesky @benclemens.
Mookie is all that is right in this world.
Remember when literally the Boston Red Sox salary dumped Mookie Betts?
Hey now!
They would have gotten a much better return if they’d only salary dumped Betts!
He’s the best at everything, always.
He’s supposed to get worse in his 30s, not better!
Has anyone ever maxed out his talents as much as Betts? It feels like we have to go to other sports to find someone. Like, Wayne Gretzky probably did more than Betts.
Yeah, I don’t think baseball had anyone like that. J-Ram is probably closest to Betts, and even then, Betts is better overall, even if I feel that Ramirez maximizes his talents more effectively (he’s still so elite as a baserunner and still great as a defender despite lacking the pure tools, whereas Mookie backslid a bit in those regards post 2018). Basically everyone else I can think of is a crazy athlete.
Steph Curry is another one. Every facet of his game is either technical skill or endurance. But that’s insane company to be keeping. Even other elite technical guy in basketball is or was crazy athletic. Maybe Luka Doncic would be in that conversation, but otherworldly balance and processing speed aren’t traits you can match with practice, and he’s very big for a guard.
Isn’t Betts also a crazy athlete, though?
considering he’s a gold glove defender all over the diamond, i’m gonna say yes. yes he is.
Not really? Average sprint speed, average-ish 95th percentile exit velocity. Not crazy agile like some. Almost everything he does is maximization of his tools by making smarter decisions than everyone else. His average exit velo plays up because he squares everything up, not because he has maximum raw power. He’s only 5’8″, he literally can’t produce the raw numbers that bigger, more toolsy guys can.
Like, yes, being an MLB player makes you more athletic than more than 99% of people to ever live, but compared to other pro athletes, he’s not really a standout in terms of pure physical tools. Even other guys of his similar size and overall production like Altuve or Lindor are more athletic. You can’t compare an MLB player to an average person, even an average athlete. They’re literally some of the best in the world. So by the standards of MLB players and similar level athletes, no, Mookie is not a crazy athlete.
You say he’s not crazy agile – I’d say he is, as agility is different to raw speed. I think he is someone who has an incredible sense of where he is, like super spatial awareness of his own body. Which is why he is able to make quality contact more often than other baseball hitters, so despite not being a top ten raw power guy, he is a top ten game power guy. And he’s doing this while moving over to shortstop in his 30s without really missing a beat.
He’s also a professional bowler…
I’d love to see him play cricket – I think he’d make a great test cricket batter (oh, and he’d be a phenomenal fielder too), and he’d probably be a handy spin bowler as well. Obviously playing cricket would require a substantial pay cut, though…
No question that his awareness is top notch, but I disagree for the agility. He makes great decisions and can track everything, but his actual twitch reaction isn’t that high. Betts is almost exactly league average in outfielder jump, for example. He makes up ground with elite routes and accurate, solid throws, and can track down anything. But he’s great because he makes all the plays you expect. Compare him to Kiermaier. Kiermaier makes nearly 20% of the “remote” plays, the ones that require the best reactions and the most agility. Betts makes 7.5%.
Re: speed and outfield jump, Betts is also 31 years old. If you go back to 2015 (the farthest back Baseball Savant will go), his speed at least (no idea about outfield jump) registers quite differently – he goes from slightly above average (2024), to solidly within the top 10%.
It sounds like you’re working with a very narrow definition of athleticism, and limiting your evaluation of Betts’ athleticism mostly to traditional baseball tools. There’s a lot more to athleticism than how hard you can hit a baseball and how fast you can run
EDLC or OC look more athletic, but over a full season I would back Mookie to put up more DWAR at any position on the diamond than either of those guys…
Not sure whether you’re referring to Orlando Cepeda or Orlando Cabrera,,,
Endorsements in cricket for someone like Mookie would probably lead to an increase in salary… particularly if he repped one of the big three test nations, but ideally if he played for India.
Might want to check out the video of him this past Spring Training doing the Wheel yoga pose and lifting each of his limbs in turn while holding the pose . . .
Mookie is a crazy athlete. But athleticism is more than running and jumping. It’s as much about being able to perform complex movements with the body while remaining on balance. Gymnasts are super athletic for instance.
Mookie’s other great gift, aside from his work ethic, is his coordination. He might be the most coordinated person on the planet. Teammates (like Enrique Hernandez on Sunday) say he’s good at everything he does and it’s because of that elite blend of coordination and athleticism he has.
Yeah it feels like we’re just saying “Mookie Betts is short”. You can be short and still have incredible athletic talent.
Yeah this is all just a bunch of very obvious equivocations on words like “athletic” and “tools.” I don’t see what it matters whether Betts can deadlift as much as Pete Alonso — he’s obviously still got innate physical talents that are even more extreme outliers from the norm, given what he’s able to do (in areas like hand-eye coordination, reaction time, and so on). He’s not just some kind of super-swot or “hard worker” who practices his way into it. To me it seems reasonably likely that if he wanted to, Betts could pick up, say, archery, or start juggling for the first time in his life, and be performing at an ordinary trained professional’s level within a week or two. Whether you call this package of special physical talents that Betts obviously has “athletic” or not is just not that interesting a question to me.
While that’s fair to say, that’s not what’s being discussed? What Bets does is not based necessarily on how fast or strong he is, it’s how well he completes actions that make him great at baseball. I can understand why there’s disagreement about what “athletic” means to some people, but explaining how I’m choosing to define it here isn’t “equivocations”. I’m not equating it with production or success, or really anything. Betts is a standout because he makes great use of trained skills and whatever mental knack he has for these things to make lesser physical tools play up and produce the same or greater value as guys who are faster or stronger.
Maybe “phsyicality” is a better word? But if anyone is equivocating on anything, it’s people disagreeing on the use of the word “athletic”.
This dichotomy you’re asserting between “fast and strong” vs “trained skills and mental knack” is completely arbitrary (there’s lots of stuff that falls in neither category), as is thinking that it’s somehow obvious that only one of the two is “athletic.” As I already said it seems to me that there is every reason on earth to believe that Betts has innate (i.e. non-“trained”), physical (i.e. non-“mental”) skills that are extreme outliers. It’s frankly bizarre to me that Betts can be this good at the specific things he’s good at, with a ball on a field, and people want to say his skills aren’t “talent” or “athletic.” To me this seems to fly in the face of the common meaning of these words!
i define “being really athletic” as “being really good at athletics.” I’m honestly not sure how else you’d define it.
By all accounts, he’s a world class athlete in a variety of sports.
To say he’s somehow not athletic is just playing semantics.
If you needed an MLB player to complete an obstacle course, you’re not taking Jose Altuve over Mookie Betts. That’s a pretty good example of athleticism in my mind.
Your use of the word innate, which you properly italicized, best defines that something, truly unmeasurable, that only a few of the most gifted super-great players have. Wayne Gretzky was not a great skater, Larry Bird was not fast, nor could he jump, Tom Brady was drafted #192 so his talent was not apparent. If the top all-time money winners in golf were lined up no one would think that the 3rd highest on that list would be Jim Furyk whose swing was the farthest thing from what is considered sound technique. That is why I will always read the scorecard or the box score and if someone is consistently outperforming their projections then we should recognize that they possess that innate magic that has propelled them to the apex of their sport. If I thought sport could be simplified down to a computer program I would never watch.
If your right then he is a dick! it takes years to master these things.
I say this as a short guy–seeing him consistently hit 30-40 HR and lead literal giants (I think Freeman and Ohtani are a combined 17 feet tall) is as much fun as his 300 bowling skill and male pattern baldness. He is all of us and none of us.
Despite being built like a toothpick, Steph Curry is famously one of the strongest guys in the league. There’s been a lot of press about his being able to deadlift 400 lbs., which for a quick bouncy guy who goes 185 or so is quite something.
Guys aren’t supposed to move from the corner OF to SS ever, much less at his age.
If we’re talking in terms of getting a lot out of a small body, Betts is right up there. Altuve, Joe Morgan, Berra, Ott, and others are close. But in another sense, maybe the answer is someone like big oaf Nikola Jokic?
That or it’s someone like Mark Buehrle who seemingly took zero inherent “athletic” (granted, not everyone can throw a ball 89 MPH left-handed) ability and turned that into a just-not-quite-HOF baseball career.
After last night’s game, my friend, a massive SF Giants fan, texted me and said, “Trust me, I want to hate Mookie, but I can’t. I DO hate the Red Sox for gifting him to the Dodgers for scraps though.”
At the time the return was considered far from scraps. Verdugo was a solid regular with lots of years of control, Downs was a highly regarded prospect, and I believe Wong was either in the top 100 or just outside of it, not to mention they took on David Price’s contract. If you’re not going to re-sign the guy (which was the dumb part), they could have done a lot worse (hindsight makes it obvious it wasn’t a great trade but it wasn’t “scraps”.)
Plus, the Dodgers had no guarantee at the time of the trade that they would be able to re-sign Mookie in his impending free agency.
This next part doesn’t figure into the value of the trade, but in the weeks following completion of the trade, it looked as though the 2020 season might have been cancelled altogether, leaving the Dodgers with the real possibility that they would never enjoy Mookie’s services.
People seem to be underestimating the impact of 2020 and Covid on Mookie’s decisionmaking, when that caused a lot of people to re-assess their priorities and what was important to them, and it seems like Mookie very much went ‘ok this org was great to all the players during this and they want to win, I don’t want to risk a downgrade’, when he may not have taken the extension if the season had played out normally
Given he extended before a season actually happened, the cancellation probably has less of an impact than if there’s no covid pandemic at all.
I’m a Yankees fan, and I can honestly say that Mookie is the only Red Sox player in my lifetime (I’m in my, let’s say late, 30s) who I actively liked while he played for Boston. I don’t see how a person could hate Mookie. Just an absolute joy to watch.
I am thus forever grateful to the Sox for trading him, first because lol what a bunch of bozos, but second and most importantly because it freed me of the nagging cognitive dissonance created by my irrepressible love for this little guy. Mookie 4ever.
I like the part of the season when I can still look at those scatterplots and remember the individual pitches. That one curveball he took right on the inside black was a fun one. I think it’s the one pitch of the year that Mookie wanted to have back.
“$50 says Mookie wins the 2024 NL MVP.”
~anonymous current teammate
This post made me go and find the epic 13-pitch battle he had with J.A. Happ that culminated with a grand slam in July 2018. And then weep softly.
Chaim Bloom getting Alex Verdugo and Connor Wong for this guy is the single worst baseball trade of my lifetime. We are not serious enough about how poorly Chaim Bloom fucked this up.
Before you say ownership mandated it, Cleveland got back Andres Gimenez and Ahmed Rosario for a lesser player (Lindor) in the same exact situation.
Before you say the Sox attached Price, the Guardians attached Carassco.
Mookie Betts is probably a top 20 baseball player of all time. Chaim Bloom traded him for absolute dogshit.
That is only true if the Curse of the Mookie is true, and the astrologers are still searching the stars for signs on that one.
I personally find it better to just think of Betts as sort of the karmic balancing out of Pedro (the Dodgers being idiots to let him go and end up being a HOFer for the Red Sox). Teams make stupid decisions.
Ohtani feels like he might kind of do the same for Piazza/Beltre, maybe as a 2 for 1.
Its really something as a Dodger fan to realize that Kershaw is like the 4th HOF player they’ve produced in my time as a fan of the team but he will end up being the first of those guys to get inducted wearing their cap. The 90s and early 2000s were a bad time for us, man.
your overall point is still correct, but at the time Carrasco was considered to be a positive part of the deal, not an “attachment” forced into it.
Hey, you’re forgetting Jeter Downs!
Do you remember the delay in the trade because the Red Sox were uming and ahing over Brusdar Graterol’s medical records, so the Dodgers just went “fine, we’ll keep him, you can have Conor Wong instead”. (Though Graterol has just hit the 60 day IL with a bum shoulder)
The lesson is do not trade a superstar to the Dodgers. Trade a competent reliever, because sometimes you get a Yordan Alvarez or an Oneil Cruz in return.
Oh man, that cracks me up. I have a buddy here in LA who is convinced that he could do a better job than Andrew Friedman and points to Alvarez as exhibits A-Z (and, I mean, yeah, it was a bad deal…but even Mookie strikes out from time to time).
It’s a good reminder that some people will invent reasons to be angry no matter what.
I always assumed the Dodgers signed Alvarez because they knew the Astros really wanted him and so outbid them (and that was the year they spent boatload on international signings that panned out to… not much at all – had the Dodgers been less successful I’m sure that $60+ million would be brought quite often, instead it was, “shrug, well, you can’t win them all”), and then got the best player they could for him from the Astros. I’m sure Friedman sees it as spending, what $4 million to get a reliever he liked.
I do wonder if it helps to get deals done of you’ve traded away prospects who turn out to be really good. If you try to massively win every trade, are other POBOs and GMs going to want to trade with you? Whereas it could be that Friedman is just about to trade away the next Alvarez…
Eric Longenhagen said in a chat here 3 or 4 years ago that he’s heard in the industry that lots of people think the Dodgers signed Alvarez sight-unseen in a handshake agreement to trade him to the Astros, becaus ethe Astros were in the no-international-pool penalty that year under the old system. So the Dodgers had basically said “Hey what do you want for Fields?” and the Astros said “Sign this kid we like and trade him to us” and the Dodgers went ‘ok, sure, whats his name?’
But in general, the thing about quote unquote lottery tickets is that most of the time they don’t work out and when they do the team that traded them looks stupid. Oneil Cruz was viewed just that way when the Dodgers moved him – huge questions about whether he’d be able to stick at shortstop, etc. It turns out he’s done an improbable thing! The Dodgers and everyone else (including, most significantly, probably the Pirates themselves) who weren’t sure he’d be able to do it weren’t wrong for that – its just that the most probable thing doesn’t always happen, and that’s why you take on huge-talent guys and see what can happen with them.
I agree that it was a bad trade but that’s not how it played out. IIRC, it was originally going to be Verdugo and Graterol, then they replaced Graterol with Downs and Wong.
I couldn’t remember 100%, and you’re right.
Because the blame is always, always misplaced in the case of Mookie Betts/Chaim Bloom. Chaim started his tenure in Boston at the end of 2019 – several years into Mookie’s major league career. He was brought in by ownership to salvage the Mookie Betts situation, and without the benefit of hindsight, he did a good job of doing just that.
Chaim may have mediocre during the rest of his stay in Boston, but he’s not the reason they got rid of Mookie Betts. I am so tired of seeing comments like yours. It’s John Henry’s fault, not Chaim Bloom’s
Good job??????? Salvaging????????
He traded one of the best baseball players of all time for three bad players!!!
I’m not blaming Chaim for getting rid of Mookie — go read the original comment again. That’s not what I said.
I am absolutely blaming Chaim for trading Mookie for idiots.
John Henry may have told him he had to trade Mookie; John Henry did not tell him to trade Mookie for bad baseball players.
And you’re saying that with the benefit of hindsight on your side. Cleveland got good players who were supposed to be worse. Boston got worse players who were supposed to be better. Prospects and even established major leaguers often don’t work out like they project to. Some are much better, and some are much worse.
You are absolutely disproportionately blaming Chaim Bloom. John Henry told him to trade Mookie Betts, and his projected return for Mookie was something like 10-12 cost-controlled wins of value in the long term IIRC, while additionally cutting half of David Price’s contract
I think unless you hate baseball, hindsight is the only way to evaluate it. I know FG writers, readers, and commentors are generally a unique subset of baseball fans more oriented towards process but ultimately it’s about results.
“Projected return” is not what anybody should care about. Also, evaluation was part of his job. He didn’t work for fangraphs; he ran a big league team. If the players he got were worse than they were supposed to be, that’s on him and it’s part of why the trade was so bad.
I think this is one where it’s actually smart to oversimplify it and it’s dumb to apply cold analysis. Trading good players for bad players is actually bad. It should always be seen as bad.
The only way to know if the players you got are good or bad is whether they play good or bad, and if they play bad instead of good then they are bad and the trade was bad.
Sure, results are important. But having a good process leads to good results. But you can’t trade for what a player has done – only what they will do, and that is an inexact science.
I think after 2020, the return the Red Sox got looks pretty strong – Verdugo just put up 1.9 fWAR in 53 games (Betts was typically great – but Verdugo was still making the league minimum). Connor Wong and Jeter Downs had both made AA for the Dodger the previous year and looked good doing it. Obviously there being no minor league season in 2020 means there was still big unknowns about Downs and Wong. Maybe it would be better to have Graterol, but he is 1) a reliever and 2) a reliever who ran a 5K/9, and maybe you’d prefer the prospects in a season that went nowhere.
But can we definitely say that it was a bad trade – after all, the Red Sox traded Verdugo, and maybe the two relief pitchers and Nicholas Judice, who doesn’t appear to have a fangraphs page, turn into perennial all stars!
You can’t reliably predict the future. When a trade is made, the pieces involved have perceived value, both in an absolute sense and with relativity to cost. You’re trying to trade X Player. He’s worth A, B, and C given his on-field value and contract. If you can get A, B, C, and additionally D, you did well. If you only get A, you did very poorly. But they’re only giving up A, and you really like A.
5 years later, A is a dynamite superstar and X is a shell who never produced a good season again after leaving. Did the team who traded for A do well? In realized value, sure. But they got lucky.
Sometimes bad moves pays off because the game is unpredictable. Likewise, a good move often fails in realization. If we judge everything with hindsight, then every single org is ran like total crap. Mike Trout was draft 25th overall. 24 teams are stupid and bad. Albert Pujols was taken in the 13th round. Every team, including the Cardinals who drafted him, are awful for not taking him 1st overall. None of that is true though. You can only do the best you can with what information you have
Results do matter though, and the results weren’t good. Ask yourself this–if Bloom had traded for a package that was projected to be pretty mediocre but turned out to be really great, would he deserve credit for that?
Of course he would. The people running baseball teams have a lot more information than we do.
Sure, but it’s not repeatable. He again would have just gotten lucky. Say he got 30 wins back for Mookie. We’d all agree that’s incredible, right? But the pieces don’t line up. 1 year of a superstar isn’t worth 30 cost-controlled wins. Try do it again. It won’t work, and it’s still a bad deal at the time it’s made even if it works out.
Anybody can fall backwards into a deal that pays off. The best executives do it consistently. That’s why Andrew Friedman is the best and there’s a big gap between guys on his level and the rest
I don’t really understand the complete disdain for Alex Verdugo here. He’s nowhere near a bad player, and the Red Sox got 5 years of control of him.
He’s a 2WAR corner outfielder with zero power and horrible attitude issues? Guys who match his production literally grow on trees, and most of them show up to work on time. Verdugo is not better than Rob Refsnyder or Wilyer Abreu or Adam Duvall, and he’s a dickhead. There’s a reason the Sox traded him to the Yankees and our fans were totally cool with it.
I completely disagree. Rob Refsnyder? Give me a break.
This comp is the strongest argument that Bloom blew this trade. It’s not his fault he had to trade Betts and of course there’s risk in any trade, but the performance of the players they got back pales next to what Cleveland got for Lindor.
Red Pop! That takes me down memory lane.
My memory is Chris Shelton started super hot that year and then was in the minors by August & never played played for Detroit again before his career just fizzled out.
Shelton stands out on that list, and not in a good way.
I remember Shelton’s run because a particularly reactive guy in my fantasy league made an absolutely ridiculous trade for him at the peak of his hot streak that ended up affecting the rest of the season.
That being said, it was the most insane streak I’ve ever seen. It was all XBHs, just homers and triples and doubles, every day for two weeks. Some of the others on that list have a lot of walks and singles in them – Shelton wasn’t walking, and he wasn’t hitting singles, he was just crushing. As evidenced by his slugging percentage being the highest on the list.
Another crazy one was Brian Roberts, April 2005. He just crushed everything for a month. It was also at the peak of steroids-in-baseball conversation, and boy were tongues a-waggin’.
Looking Shelton’s streak over again, it was 9 homers, 3 triples, and 5 doubles in 13 games. If you project that rate over 162 games you get 112 homers, 37!! triples, and 62 doubles. He finished the year with 16 HRs, 4 triples, and 16 doubles.
The Brian Roberts April 2005 slash line was .379/.459/.726 with 8 HRs and 10 SBs. With that huge head start he finished the year .314/.387/.515 with 16 HRs and 27 SBs. Quite a month.
Bonds OBP dropped .006 from his 2002 start for the whole season….
Next closest was Walker dropping .074, but he was already lower than Bonds by .062.
A Dodger article not written by Jay Jaffe? How did that happen?
Any discussion of Mookie Betts returns me to those first games I watched him play at Salem in the summer of 2013. He did it all even then and I was hooked. He came to New England in the spring of 2014 and I went searching for him. I recall a series in New Britain in which he got several hits, played great defense and threw in a bomb over the scoreboard in left center that was in the range of 420′. Then it was off to Portland, Manchester and Providence for more of the same. His years with the Red Sox were phenomenal but I am not breaking new ground there. Even after he made it quite clear that he was going to leave, or at least test free agency, my appreciation of him and his game never lessened. I have had great pleasure following the Red Sox for, this is now, 76 years, and the players change but to this day and forever, he will always be in that tiny group of Red Sox players who transcended the others trailing only Papi, Yaz and Ted.
Has anyone ever moved from OF to SS in his 30s and actually been good at SS? Who knows if these metrics hold up over a full season but that would have to be virtually unprecedented.
It makes one wonder why he ever played anywhere else
You say they won’t hold up, but what if?
everyone knows mookie can’t stay this hot. what this comment presupposes is…maybe he can?
Unlikely… but I would not bet against Marcus Lynn Betts!
Have all but boycotted Fenway and all things John Henry as a result (making an exception only to see Shohei Ohtani!)
Absolutely love it. Good for Mookie.
He’s only on a 25 WAR pace. What’s the big deal?
Whenever you think Betts has reached his peak, he somehow gets even better. It’s been happening since early in his career when his comps would include Andrew McCutchen, and there was a consensus that, well, he’s obviously not that good, but he’s still impressive. He added power, moved from 2B to the OF and became an elite RF, and now has moved back to the middle infield and is somehow excellent there. It’s only a matter of time before he’s at the top of the Dodgers rotation and closing out games on his throw day between starts.
Obligatory Jeff Sullivan repost: https://blogs.fangraphs.com/youre-not-as-hot-as-barry-bonds/
That article is about Bonds’ 2004 season which isn’t even the one in the chart here. Bonds had a 275 wRC+ through 8 games that year. His OBP was .588, the same as in 2002, but his slugging was only .960. Most absurd is that his OBP ended up higher at the end of the 2004 season, .609.
Mookie has been so great that ZIPS now projects him to tie Acuna with 7.5 WAR on the year. This is your reminder that ZIPS loves itself some Acuna.
The article was about Mookie’s hot start. The comment section was gibberish.