Through five games of the World Series, the Dodgers’ lineup has sputtered out, hitting just .201/.296/.354, and there’s blame to be assigned up and down the order – even to Shohei Ohtani, who, when not reaching base nine times in Game 3, has just two hits and two walks in the other four games combined. Manager Dave Roberts has attempted to adjust, moving Will Smith up to the No. 2 spot for Game 5 on Wednesday night, and he’s benched center fielder Andy Pages, who is having something like the weakest hitting postseason ever.
Valid changes, but ultimately, there’s only so much you can do when one of your biggest stars – one of the biggest stars – is not hitting. Mookie Betts, the three-time World Series winner and eight-time All-Star who pulled off one of the most unprecedented positional moves in history, is very much not hitting. Roberts moved him to third in the order for Game 5, the lowest he’d hit in more than four years. He went 0-4 in the 6-1 loss.
"I've just been terrible," Betts said after Game 5. "I wish it were from lack of effort, but it's not."
Betts has just three hits in five games, all singles, only one hit hard. That’s after he had just two hits in four games against the Brewers, and four hits in four games against the Phillies. While he did splatter the Reds with six hits in the two-game Wild Card Series, that was a month ago now. October 31, the day of Game 6, will mark six weeks since his last home run. It’s a big part of why teams this postseason have been so willing to intentionally walk Ohtani to bring Betts to the plate.
It’s difficult to say for certain what’s ailing Betts, in much the same way that it was difficult to clearly understand the shape of his 2025 season as a whole, which started poorly – .674 OPS in his first 100 games – included an unplanned July day off to “reset” and ended red-hot, with him posting an .846 OPS in his final 50 games. (We could at least point to some personal issues earlier on, as he missed the start of a season with a serious virus, then broke a toe on his left foot in May, and was away from the team in late July after his stepfather passed. It’s been a long year in a lot of ways.)
If it’s harder to get the shape of his season, then it’s a lot easier to look at the shape of his swing, and there, at least, we have something interesting to investigate. Betts’ swing in the World Series is different, by quite a lot, from what it was even earlier in the postseason.
His earlier October struggles show that this isn’t necessarily the cause of his issues so much as it is the reaction to them – Betts, it seems, may be doing his best to hit the ball 900 feet each time up. Compared to earlier series, his swing is longer, with a much steeper attack angle (the vertical direction the bat is moving as it hits the ball), and far more angled to the pull side.
To put those numbers up there in context: A 13° attack angle is considerably higher than his usual 9° (the Major League average is 10°), and is more similar to high-powered strikeout sluggers like Matt Wallner or Salvador Perez, and the 12° pull-side attack direction (where the average is 0°) would be so extreme over a full season that only one hitter, the notoriously pull-sided Isaac Parades (15°) could top it.
It’s a home run swing, one that hasn’t led to homers. It hasn’t led to strikeouts, either. It’s mostly led to pop-ups and weak fly balls. Betts has 10 pops and flies, tied with Tommy Edman for the most of any player in the World Series. Combined, they’re 0-for-20 – as opposed to players like Ohtani and Vladimir Guerrero Jr., who hit theirs hard enough to find the seats sometimes. Because of those low-probability weak flies, Betts can’t even really point to bad luck or great defense; his .143 expected average, based on quality of contact, is pretty much bang-on the .130 he’s actually got.
Betts’ swing speed, surprisingly, is up a little, either because he’s trying so hard for power or because he’s trying to meet it out front, at the peak of the speed of the swing. Either way, while Betts’ declining bat speed is a real issue, it doesn’t seem to be any more of a concern right now than earlier this year.
“I think he’s pressing,” Roberts said. “I think you can see there’s a little anxiousness in there.”
Pressing would be understandable, at least, given the struggles not only of Betts but the entire Dodger lineup. Someone’s got to hit, after all, and a single alone seems unlikely to be followed by more singles. It stands out, though, because getting a little too pull-happy and presumably homer-hunting – after all, even at his peak, Betts isn’t exactly a man the stature of Giancarlo Stanton, and so found almost all of his power to the pull side – seemed to be in large part what was fueling his first-half struggles.
When Betts turned it around in the second half, after having worked not only with Dodger hitting coaches but former Boston and Los Angeles teammate J.D. Martinez, it was with an obvious change in his swing, which was notable two months ago.
That is, we admit, a lot of charts and numbers, but the story they tell is that when Betts improved, it was because of a shorter, line drive swing, not reliant on pull homers. Sometimes they were hit perfectly and became homers, sure, but that wasn’t entirely the point. What we’re seeing now is not that swing – and it’s a hard thing to do to try to pair 10th percentile bat speed with a lofty swing. It's almost like all of that work has been undone now.
Which, ironically, is exactly the opposite of what you’re constantly hearing across the Majors today, where batters are trying to gain speed and add loft to find the seats. There’s a lot of good reason to be doing that – Toronto, despite their reputation as a contact hitting team, is here because they added a ton of swing speed and have been even more reliant on homers in October than they were in the regular season – but the barrier to entry is at least a minimum of swing speed.
“There’s a little bit of mechanics,” said Roberts, “[and] good pitches. He’s working hard. Right now, all that matters is going up there and taking four or five good plate appearances.”
It’s important to remember here that there’s another side to the game as well. It would be a dereliction of duty not to give some credit to the Blue Jays’ pitching staff, particularly young Trey Yesavage, who held Betts to just a lonely walk in six plate appearances. It’s stunning to think that despite Yesavage and Kevin Gausman starting games, Toronto has thrown Betts just one offspeed pitch among the 104 he’s seen, by far the lowest rate of any of the four staffs he’s faced in October. (He struck out.)
It’s also, to some extent, the effects of trying to put Great Big Importance on just five games, as though any great hitter can’t have a bad week in the regular season. The Dodgers, for example, have a .651 OPS in the Series, and they had that poor a mark or lower in 22 different (sometimes overlapping) five-game spans this season.
The Dodgers can still come back to win, because it’s not unreasonable to ask them to win two games in a row after they did exactly that in Games 2 and 3 before the Jays did the same in Games 4 and 5. It’s not nearly over, yet. It’s just going to require a lot more out of Betts than he’s given. It might require a swing that’s not quite as geared for power as the one he’s showing now.