Dodgers’ Mookie Betts turns hard contact into outs

Mookie Betts is hitting .203 through 40 games, missing time in April with an oblique strain. Even when he makes what Baseball Savant calls elite contact, the results haven’t matched—leaving him to confront the gap between expected batting average and reality,

For Mookie Betts, the frustrating part doesn’t start with a swing—it starts with what happens right after.

Tuesday evening, in the bottom of the sixth inning, Betts timed up a first-pitch cutter from Rays right-hander Drew Rasmussen. The pitch was left right down the middle. and Betts took an aggressive swing that sent the ball off his bat at 101.3 mph. The contact was the kind that should leave a hitter smiling.

Baseball Savant put a bow on it with an expected batting average of .640, the sort of line-drive contact that lands safely more than six times out of 10.

It didn’t.

As Betts broke out of the box, he looked up and saw Rays infielder Taylor Walls snare the ball for a lineout at shortstop.

“You just kind of have to live with that,” Betts said a day later. “It sucks living with. But what else can you do?”

That moment reads like a snapshot of a season that, so far, has refused to cooperate.

Through 40 games—Betts missed more than a month with an oblique strain in April—the 33-year-old is hitting .203. It’s 85 points below his career average, and 55 points worse than his career-worst mark of .258 in 2025.

The numbers that trouble him most don’t come from the eye test. They come from the way his contact has looked.

Baseball Savant has his expected batting average at .277. The gap—74 points between his actual and expected marks—is the biggest in baseball.

In plain terms: Betts may be hitting the ball the way an elite hitter usually does. The outcomes just aren’t arriving.

And he’s well aware of how lopsided it is. The Dodgers’ hitting staff has reminded him of the analytics as he tries to turn the season around.

“The coaches are trying to help keep me positive, which I wholeheartedly appreciate,” Betts said in an interview with The California Post on Wednesday.

At the same time, he doesn’t treat expected statistics like a scoreboard.

He said expected numbers are “not real.”

“I want to keep hitting it hard and throwing my hat in the ring for hits, which [you do by] hitting it hard and on the right angle and all that,” Betts said. “But I also want to win the game. So a bloop sometimes is better.”

Betts missed more than a month with an oblique strain. and his .203 average is the part that keeps showing up in the box score. But his frustration has also been tied to the way his swing has been drifting—especially the sense that he’s been getting “cutting my swing off” and not “staying through [the ball]. staying inside of it” enough.

Hard contact has been there. Elevation with power, he says, hasn’t.

“It’s not necessarily that I want to hit it in the air [for a fly ball],” Betts said. “I just want to get it off the ground.”

So for the first time in his career, he’s started diving deeper into the mechanics—paying renewed attention to body positioning, swing angles, and where on the bat he’s making contact.

He knows the process is heavier mentally.

“My whole life, I haven’t really had to think in this type of detail,” Betts said. “I’ve been able to just have an innate ability to figure it out. Figure out how to get hits. Figure out how to compete. But now. I don’t know what it is. but if I’m not perfect. if I’m not in the right position. hitting it center on the bat. I don’t really have much of a chance.”.

That heightened margin for error isn’t just about this year’s swing. Betts has spent a 13-year career fighting factors that have tightened with age. He’s always been undersized, and below-average bat speed has narrowed what he can afford to miss.

This year added complications: the oblique injury, and the transition last year to being a full-time shortstop. He continues to stand out defensively, including last week’s error to snap Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s perfect-game bid. But the offensive stretch has remained unforgiving.

He has seven home runs this season. Still, the recent stretch has not matched the promise.

In a series sweep against the Rays, Betts went 2-for-11. Tuesday’s lineout at shortstop was just one of multiple hard-hit balls that became outs.

Last weekend, he showed flashes—five hits, including a pull-side drive for his seventh home run of the year, during a trip to Chicago against the White Sox. But it didn’t turn into a sustained shift.

After that Rays series, the search has become part of the story.

“I think the word I would say, if I had to sum it up, is he’s been searching,” manager Dave Roberts said. “I think all year he’s been searching, and nothing has stuck.”

Betts is hopeful some recent adjustments have answers. He said Wednesday that he has made mechanical changes intended to simplify his swing. He believes he’s improved at “attacking” the ball and hitting it with a preferred launch angle.

“It’s just more off the ground,” he said. “Ground balls are outs in the big leagues.”

Yet the results keep piling up in the wrong direction. The batting average remains the worst of his career, and the longer it stays there, the harder it becomes to treat the gap as mere luck.

Betts put it this way: analytics can map the quality, but they still can’t rewrite what defenders do.

“[The analytics] could predict that this ball I just hit has a .400 average, but it’s still a lineout,” he said. “So sure, those are great [from a contact standpoint]. You probably analyze players that way. But I’m trying to win the game.”

For the Dodgers. winning games at the MLB-best pace they’re running right now is the context that hangs over all of this. If they’re going to keep stacking wins. they eventually need Betts’ actual production to catch up with his expected metrics—because the sport doesn’t grade swings. It grades results.

Mookie Betts Dodgers expected batting average Baseball Savant Rays Drew Rasmussen Taylor Walls oblique strain swing adjustments MLB unluckiest hitter