Mookie Betts Is Attempting an Unprecedented Move
Switching from outfield to shortstop is something no player this great has tried before.
Not one full year ago did Los Angeles Dodgers superstar Mookie Betts make the first appearance at shortstop of his MLB career. ("It was like a dream come true," Betts said after the game, on April 20, 2023.) Now, with teammate Gavin Lux struggling to field at SS, Betts is reportedly moving to short permanently as L.A.’s everyday starter — a dramatic change for a player who’d made 91% of his previous MLB appearances in the outfield before 2024.
No, it’s not as though Betts is a total stranger to the middle of the infield. He was drafted as a second baseman, and played his first pro action in Rookie ball as a shortstop before moving back to second in the minor leagues, then finally to the outfield as he broke into the majors.
Betts also eased his cleats back onto the infield dirt last season by appearing at 2B in 36% of his defensive games, and at SS in an additional 8% of games. That’s a lot of time to be spent at two totally different spots on the field, even if it still left 55% of his games in the OF — meaning he technically played his usual position more often than not.
By all indications, it sounds like Betts is going to push that change a lot further this season. And if he does end up primarily playing middle infield — especially SS — he’ll be easily the best player to make that change, particularly at his age. (He’ll be 31 in 2024.)
Here’s a list of the best players by Wins Above Replacement (WAR)1 in the season before making a switch from being a primary (i.e., >50% of games) outfielder to a primary middle infielder:
Betts will be far and away the most valuable OF to make the move to middle IF the next year; only Ketel Marte (who moved from half-CF/half-2B to full-time 2B in 2020) even comes remotely close. But maybe even more striking is that Betts is doing this at age 31, when the majority of other seasons on the list came far earlier in a player’s career. (And in the cases that weren’t, like Ben Zobrist in 2019, he had already moved all over the diamond as a younger player.)
If anybody can pull this off, it’s Mookie — who had excellent fielding metrics (+15 Defensive Runs Saved per 1,200 innings) at second base after barely playing it for a decade. (He’s also just one of the most talented players to ever play this game, and deserved better than the unanimous MVP loss to Ronald Acuña Jr. last season, even if Acuña was Mr. Baseball for 2023.)
And if slotting a player into a still-brand-new position that might be the most important spot on the field is a big risk for L.A., nobody told the oddsmakers — the Dodgers are still listed with an absolutely absurd preseason over/under of 103.5 wins, per FanDuel. Maybe that’s a testament to how stacked Betts’ team is, but it’s also a sign that Betts is probably going to help the team win a lot of games no matter where they put him.
Filed under: Baseball
Naturally, using my JEFFBAGWELL version — aka the Joint Estimate Featuring FanGraphs and B-R Aggregated to Generate WAR, Equally Leveling Lists.