Last spring brought Mookie Betts to an emotional state he hadn’t encountered in over a decade. His unease while manning shortstop for the Los Angeles Dodgers reminded him of how he felt at 20 years old, when he contemplated ending his baseball career before it even took off.
This time, even as one of the most decorated players in the majors, he again felt lost.
“For me to go and be embarrassed on a baseball field, it took a lot, man,” Betts said.
The Dodgers had moved him from right field to shortstop just two weeks before Opening Day. It was a rude reintroduction to the position he had played for a grand total of 31 games as a professional — and a spot he hadn’t permanently called home since he was a teenager.
An 18-year-old Betts started his first game as a pro at short in the Boston Red Sox system in 2011. He committed three errors in just six innings. Two years later, in the midst of a slump, he signed up for the ACT college admissions test. He was going to quit.
“I hadn’t been embarrassed like that since then,” Betts, now 32, said.
When the Dodgers tried to turn him back into a starting shortstop again, he’d lie in bed at night and rack his brain for memories of Overton High, the last time he’d played short with any regularity.
Betts was back at shortstop full-time in 2024 after Gavin Lux, the club’s primary choice at the position, struggled defensively in spring training. Betts had dabbled at the position in 2023, but before that hadn’t played a single inning of shortstop since the 2013 Arizona Fall League.
Mookie Betts helped the Dodgers win a World Series and almost immediately began work on refining his defensive skills. (Rick Scuteri / Imagn Images)
The early months of last season tested Betts’ stamina, as he spent hours before games looking to bridge a gap more than a decade long at the position. This is what had him tossing and turning. Betts recalled spending nights awake, thinking through plays he believed he should have made.
Betts broke his wrist in June, seemingly ending his run as the Dodgers’ everyday shortstop after a few unsteady months. Upon his return, Betts went back to right field. The Dodgers won the World Series.
In retrospect, the rush job last spring might have been too much to ask.
“No successful person came from being thrown in the fire,” Betts said recently at his locker at Camelback Ranch, where the Dodgers opened spring training last month. “I was expecting a lot out of myself in a situation that, now that I step back and look at it, there was no real way to succeed in that. Not really. I tried it, I give myself credit for trying.”
Now, he and the Dodgers are trying again. Betts has expressed a desire to prove people wrong. He’s appeared enlivened by the challenge. But more than anything, Betts, one of the more accomplished players in the sport, is putting his pride on the line again.
The Dodgers have spent more than any team in baseball over the past few seasons, but not at shortstop. Instead, they’ll put a $365 million outfielder in one of the game’s most critical defensive spots. It’s an audacious experiment, but he and the Dodgers are banking on a one-of-a-kind talent to overcome it. Betts’ competency at shortstop last summer, he said, was the equivalent of a player in A-ball.
All Betts needed to prove himself right, he said, was time.
“Anything you do in life takes preparation,” he said.
So, two weeks after winning his third title in 11 big-league seasons and second in five years in Los Angeles, Betts got to work.
First, Betts needed to solidify who would help him cram years’ worth of shortstop education into a four-month offseason.
Chris Woodward, the Dodgers’ infield coach who returned to the organization last year after managing the Texas Rangers, rejoined the coaching staff this winter. He served as the center of communication, managing phone calls and going through video with Betts on a near-nightly basis.
Ryan Goins, a former big-league infielder who is one of Betts’ longtime friends in the game, and is now an infield coach for the Angels under Ron Washington (who Betts consulted early in his transition last spring), lent his voice, reinforcing positivity with his friend while adding some in-person insights as he traveled around with Betts.
Pedro Montero, one of the Dodgers’ video coordinators, met with Betts throughout the winter to hit him countless ground balls and log video to send to everyone else.
Next came finding places to work. With Dodger Stadium under renovation this winter, that largely meant scouring Los Angeles-area high schools and colleges for a place to continue Betts’ education.
That also involved a brief trip to Austin, Texas, where Betts flew around New Year’s Day with Goins to work with former All-Star shortstop and current University of Texas assistant Troy Tulowitzki.
Then came refining Betts’ routine. His laborious pregame work sessions spanned hours and hundreds of ground balls before regular-season games. He shrugged off the idea that it wore him down. But avoiding fatigue remained a concern.
“He’s obviously built up stamina to be able to handle a lot of this, but I do worry about it,” Woodward said of Betts’ daily routine. “I don’t want the workload to be too much to where he’s physically deteriorating as a season goes on. Because the mental wear is enough.”
Betts learned there are no shortcuts to learning shortstop and spent his offseason honing his craft at the position. (Rick Scuteri / Imagn Images)
So Betts went about paring down the routine this winter, initially on calls with Woodward in Arizona and sometimes on three-way calls with Montero to ensure the ideas were consistent. The hours-long sessions ranged from three days per week in November to five and six times a week as the Dodgers prepared to report to spring training in early February. In the week before heading to Arizona for spring training, Betts and Montero met each day.
Each day would start with barehand drills. That progressed to Betts working from his knees, where he handled short-hops, back-picks and added quick work with his hands using gloves varying in shapes and sizes.
Then Montero would grab a fungo bat from near the lip of the grass in front of the dirt at shortstop and hit sets of grounders to Betts’ right, left and right at him. They focused on Betts’ hands at first, then on nailing down his footwork before getting into what had been Betts’ primary issue during his first foray as the Dodgers’ shortstop — he committed nine errors at the position, with all but one coming on a throw.
Then Montero would back up to around the pitcher’s mound and repeat the process, incorporating “random” instructions and live reps — with situation, runners on and pitch types and locations — to help Betts simulate game speed.
“It was definitely not just me whacking groundballs,” Montero said. “There was a purpose behind everything.”
The aim, Woodward said, was to make all of the intricacies about the position — the footwork, the angles, the routes, the fundamentals — automatic. If Betts was going to be thinking out at shortstop, it was going to be about the situation and not where his hands would be positioned if a ball spun in his direction. If he could master the base skill set, he could make the position his own. For years, Betts patrolled right field much like an infielder would, from his ability to read bounces to his quick-firing hips and fluid motions.
Now was his chance to similarly make shortstop into something unique to him.
“That’s where the confidence comes from,” Woodward said. “Not everybody plays the same at shortstop.”
Years ago, in Woodward’s first stint with the Dodgers, the coach brought along another budding shortstop with real concerns about his eventual fit at the position. Corey Seager, who is listed at 6-foot-4, felt pushback for wanting to remain a shortstop despite his large frame and the limited track record of full-time players that size at the position. So Woodward was tasked with finding a way to make the position work for the budding top prospect.
For Seager, it meant usually fielding grounders with one hand instead of two, and often attacking the baseball rather than waiting for it to come to him. Woodward’s mission for Betts, he said, did not involve showing him tape and insisting he mimic the actions of a Dansby Swanson or a Ezequiel Tovar or even his opponent in the World Series, Anthony Volpe. Instead, it was about finding something that worked for Betts — even if it didn’t quite fit what Tom Emanski advised for the position.
Montero described Betts’ defensive style as “downhill,” as the shortstop used his unique athleticism to make plays on the ball and rely on preternatural instincts. And even if the specific way Betts handles the position is his own, there’s consistency in the underlying fundamentals.
That includes Betts’ footwork, which has looked notably more consistent this spring as he’s allowed his athleticism to make plays, much like he did in right field. He can charge a baseball without hesitation, giving himself more time and not feeling rushed on throws.
After soliciting advice from the likes of Tulowitzki, a two-time Gold Glove winner, and trying out an array of options, he and the Dodgers settled on an arm slot that works for him. Betts starts his throw with his hand near his right ear, even when throwing from different angles and speeds across the diamond. This slot keeps Betts’ fingers on top of the ball rather than to the side of it, giving his throws carry on the way to first base without sacrificing accuracy or creating a moving target.
It didn’t take long for people to notice this spring.
“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,” said Miguel Rojas, a veteran shortstop whom Betts relied upon often early last season.
The results are noticeable.
“Having the entire offseason to work on it is gonna be a game-changer for him,” Kiké Hernández said.
Betts and the Dodgers insist they are trying this preposterous idea because they believe it will help them win.
“I think the scarcity of shortstop is underappreciated,” Dodgers general manager Brandon Gomes said. “(Along with) the fact that he was the only right fielder that could do that and a guy who really wants to do it.”
Advanced metrics weren’t all that favorable to Betts. And yet, at the time Betts landed on the injured list on June 17, only Kansas City’s Bobby Witt Jr. and Baltimore’s Gunnar Henderson had generated more FanGraphs WAR among shortstops. The dearth of offense at the position makes Betts an incredibly valuable player, even if his defense never creeps above average. At the time of his injury, he was a top-10 bat in the game, with a weighted runs created plus of 153 (53 percent above league average) and 10 home runs to go with his .304 batting average.
The Dodgers let Seager walk after the 2021 season and had Trea Turner leave via free agency the winter after that, and really never settled the position after the two $300 million-plus shortstops went elsewhere. Lux tore his ACL in 2023, leaving the position to Rojas — a veteran who is a whiz with the glove but whose highest single-season OPS outside of 2020 is .748. When Lux’s defensive woes became too much to handle last spring, the Dodgers pivoted to Betts.
Betts’ potential surplus value at a premium position impacted how the Dodgers approached their roster this winter. Betts going to shortstop allowed the Dodgers to have right field open to re-sign Teoscar Hernández, even after giving Michael Conforto a one-year, $17 million deal to be their everyday left fielder. It allowed the Dodgers to maintain flexibility with Tommy Edman, who started at shortstop the night the Dodgers won the World Series but has played almost everywhere around the diamond and could be the Dodgers’ Opening Day starter at center field or second base.
The Dodgers still have alternatives at shortstop. Edman is a logical fallback if needed. Rojas just turned 36, but can be called upon in a pinch. Hernández has some experience at the position. And while Hyeseong Kim has struggled at the plate this spring in his first taste of facing major-league pitching, he too has experience at shortstop.
Of course, Betts is planning on not needing a contingency.
“You hear noise, you see noise, you get people asking you why you’re doing this and all this other stuff,” Betts said. “I’m not oblivious to it. That’s not the driving force. The driving force is to win. I feel like this is something that we talked about that would help us win. I’m just doing that.”
The plan is not to be just average, or not to be embarrassed.
“Mookie’s different,” Max Muncy said this spring. “I think this kind of challenge is really fun for him. … When you look at how he approaches it, he’s having so much fun trying to get as good as he can be. There’s not really any question in anyone’s mind in here that he’s going to be a very good defensive shortstop.”
Earlier this spring, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said that Betts has looked “two grades better” at the position. He contrasted that to last year, when he saw Betts as “an elite athlete playing a premium position.”
This year?
Said Roberts: “I see a shortstop.”
(Top photo: Rick Scuteri / Imagn Images)
