Mookie Betts’ bat has gone quiet at the worst possible time for the Dodgers, and it’s turning an already uneasy stretch into something a lot more alarming. Los Angeles is down 0-3 to the Milwaukee Brewers in the NLCS, with its pitchers looking mortal and its star hitters either hurt or simply not producing.
Betts is part of that problem. Through seven playoff games this season, the former Boston Red Sox standout is hitting .231/.355/.231. All six of his hits have been singles, he has drawn five walks, and he has scored one run.
That line doesn’t come out of nowhere. Betts’ decline has been building for two seasons now, and what used to feel like a temporary dip is starting to look more like the new normal.
In 2026, he hit .257/.326/.454 with 25 doubles and 23 home runs over 123 games, missing about a month early in the year because of an oblique strain. The year before, after a brutal stomach illness before the season, he posted a .258/.326/.406 line with 23 doubles, two triples and 20 homers across 150 games.
For a player who had been so reliably dangerous, the drop has been hard to miss. Betts hit .284/.372/.530 in his first five seasons with the Dodgers, a level of production that made him look like a steady force in the middle of the lineup.
Age explains part of the picture, but not all of it - he only just turned 34, and the slide has been abrupt. In 2024, his hard-hit rate fell by nearly 10 percent from the season before and has not bounced back, while his barrel percentage and bat speed metrics have moved in the same downward stretch.
That’s what makes the contract such a looming issue. Betts is signed for five more years, through his age-39 season, at over $30 million per year. If this version of his offense sticks around, that deal suddenly looks a lot riskier from the Dodgers’ side.
None of that changes Betts’ place in the game’s history. He is already a guaranteed Hall of Famer: eight-time All-Star, former MVP, batting title winner and four-time World Series champion. He was even on pace for 3,000 hits before this recent offensive stall, though that no longer feels like a sure thing.
And while the Red Sox trade remains a disaster in the bigger picture and a bad optics move, Betts had too many great years in Los Angeles to hand John Henry any kind of credit. He could still rebound. But right now, with the Dodgers stuck in a 0-3 hole and Betts stuck in a long slump, the pendulum has swung a lot farther than anyone in Los Angeles would like.
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