Mookie Betts has already built a résumé most players can only dream about, but the Dodgers star still sounds like someone with plenty left to chase.
At 33, Betts has stacked up eight All-Star selections, an American League MVP award and 13 seasons in the majors. The biggest line on the page, though, is the one that comes with championship weight: four World Series titles. Three of those have come with Los Angeles, and the other came against the Dodgers in 2018.
Even with all that hardware, Betts isn’t talking like a player who’s satisfied. He told R-org, “The more the merrier,” and made it clear he’s still locked in on winning.
“There’s no target. Winning one was the target.
Now that I’ve gotten more than one, this is all playing with house money and we got the team to continue to win. It’s just a matter of us putting it together.
Obviously, there’s a lot of other teams that are out there that are really good, but we got a good squad, and we just got to keep playing.”
The bigger question now is how long he plans to keep doing it. Betts has been more open about retirement lately, and he’s said he sees himself playing for “five or six years," which would line up with the end of his 12-year, $365 million contract that runs through 2026.
He’s also said he wants manager Dave Roberts to retire alongside him.
For now, Betts is still in the middle of a season that hasn’t matched his usual standard. He’s batting .237 with 13 home runs, 34 RBIs and a .731 OPS, numbers that make this the worst statistical season of his career. He also missed time earlier this year with an oblique injury.
Even so, the Dodgers believe he can still be a difference-maker when October arrives.
Betts hasn’t lost the edge that made him a star in the first place, and he’s made it clear that when he walks away, it’ll be on his terms.
“It seems like it gets longer and longer every year. It seems like I’ve signed another five-year deal every year I play," Betts said.
"But no, I don’t have a target age or anything. I will just take the jersey off when I feel like it’s time.
I don’t want to go. I want to go out on my own terms and not because somebody else took it off.”
Since Betts arrived in Los Angeles seven years ago, the Dodgers have changed right along with him, collecting three World Series titles in that span. And Betts, as always, remains at the center of it: productive, driven and still thinking about what comes next.
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