LOS ANGELES -- With one game remaining for the Dodgers in the first half, their quartet of National League All-Star hitters sure seems ready to take center stage.
Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman, J.D. Martinez and Will Smith all homered in an 11-4 win over the Angels on Friday night at Dodger Stadium.
“I think that, with all the stuff we've been going through, those guys have been a constant,” said manager Dave Roberts. “... So they've carried us. They've carried this offense.”
As his first Home Run Derby appearance on Monday approaches, Betts got in a good warmup by leaving the yard twice. In the third inning, Angels starter Griffin Canning hung a first-pitch curveball to Betts, who drove it a Statcast-projected 403 feet to center field. Facing Tyler Anderson in the fifth, Betts connected with a 1-1 cutter, which just sneaked over the low left-field wall.
Betts now has 25 homers on the season, a first-half career high for him.
“He's really himself this year and it's really fun to watch,” Roberts said of Betts. “I think that he’s continually getting more comfortable with us, but this is as comfortable as I've seen him, and it's certainly showing on the field.”
Betts will be the NL’s starting right fielder on Tuesday, but it was second base where he started on Friday. Infield appearances are becoming more common for Betts, as it was his 13th start at second, paired with 18 starts at shortstop.
And it’s getting difficult to ignore how he’s fared at the plate when playing the infield rather than the outfield. When he’s played right field, he’s batted .243 with an .864 OPS. Playing the infield, he’s batted .328 with a 1.112 OPS.
Roberts suggested that playing on the dirt keeps Betts more engaged, though Betts disputed that theory.
“I mean, I won [AL] MVP in right field [in 2018]. So that's my argument to that,” said Betts. “It doesn't really matter where I play. The box is the box, and defense is defense. They’re two separate things and I keep them that way.”
Friday marked Betts’ fourth two-homer game of the season. He is currently tied for the all-time AL/NL lead with six career three-homer games. Betts had a chance to go for the sole lead in the sixth, but settled for a two-run double. In the eighth, the Angels took the bat out of his hands by intentionally walking him to get a left-on-left matchup for Aaron Loup against Freeman (despite Freeman’s effectiveness vs. southpaws).
“It means I’m doing something good,” said Betts, whose last intentional walk came on July 11, 2021. “So it was just pretty cool, because it's been a long time since that's happened.”
Betts, of course, had plenty of help in the Dodgers’ rout of their SoCal rivals. It was Freeman’s first-inning solo shot, his 16th of the season, that opened the scoring in the second. That made it two straight games with a homer for Freeman, who’d hit a two-run blast against the Pirates on Thursday.
Martinez, starting designated hitter for the Senior Circuit, tacked on in the second inning with his 21st big fly of the season. He picked up another RBI with a double in the following frame. Smith, on the NL roster as a reserve, joined the power party late with an eighth-inning two-run blast. Prior to that, he’d recorded a pair of singles and a run scored.
“Our guys, it’s the best group I’ve ever been with,” said Roberts. “They like each other, they play for one another, and a little bit of kind of wanting to one-up one another. So it's kind of fun. It's a healthy competition.”
At 12 games over .500 and half a game behind the first-place D-backs in the NL West, the Dodgers are not exactly where they envisioned themselves at this point in the season. They’d be the first to admit that they haven’t always played up to their own standards. But Friday’s game was a reminder of just how potent they can be when they’re firing on all cylinders.
“You're going to go through your ups and your downs,” said Betts. “We’ve had some pretty low downs, but I think this team is just resilient. We're just a bunch of homies in here, playing baseball. And you can tell we're playing for each other, and no matter which side of the ball is not doing well, the other side is cheering them on and we're fighting ‘till the end.”