Talking to Mookie Betts, I almost wanted to pull an Allen Iverson.
“Bat speed? You’re worried about bat speed?”
An eight-time All-Star, seven-time Silver Slugger and three-time World Series champion is about the last player you would expect to fret, especially when he is still an elite performer.
In April, The Athletic grouped Betts with five others in Tier 1 on its list of the top 100 position players in baseball. ESPN ranked Betts third among all players, MLB Network fifth.
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Still, Betts worries about everything, freely acknowledging he puts too much pressure on himself. And, to a degree, his concern with bat speed is warranted. It is one of the rare weaknesses in his game.
Betts, in an interview Friday, attributed a recent 13-game stretch in which he batted .176 to bad habits he created returning from an illness in March that caused him to lose 20 pounds — habits he formed trying to regain his bat speed.
“I have a baseline of numbers as far as bat speed that I try and hit throughout the day to make sure I’m moving fast enough and ready for a game. I could not get the bat to those numbers,” Betts said.
“My bat speed, even fully healthy, is already below average. Now you take off 20 pounds and it’s even worse. I’m like, ‘Man, I’ve got to do whatever it takes to get the barrel going.’”
Mookie Betts belts his 5th homer of the season 💪 pic.twitter.com/WDF1GDrAtk
— MLB (@MLB) May 3, 2025
A player’s bat speed tends to decline with age and Betts turns 33 on Oct. 7. Still, the Dodgers are not overly concerned. Betts emerged from his slump to bat .324 with a .817 OPS in his last 10 games. And his bat speed does not define him as a hitter.
Case in point: Betts is at the top of the leaderboard in another bat-tracking metric Statcast introduced this season, squared-up rate. His success in that area stems from the efficiency of his bat path, his ability to repeatedly connect with the sweet spot and achieve close to his maximum attainable exit velocity.
Well before Statcast made bat-tracking data available, teams developed metrics to assess players’ swings. Betts was among a group of Los Angeles Dodgers hitters who visited Driveline Baseball just outside of Seattle during the 2022-23 offseason. After the visit, he began using a metal bat with redistributed weight in batting practice, trying to build bat speed.
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His work seemed to bear fruit. His .987 OPS in 2023 was the second-highest of his career, behind only his 1.078 mark with the Boston Red Sox in 2018, when he won American League MVP.
Yet, even in that resurgent ’23 season, Betts’ average bat speed was below the norm. Statcast measured it at 71.3 mph, in the 38th percentile of all players. He has declined since, dropping in 2024 to 69 mph (13th percentile) and — through Tuesday — 67.4 mph (sixth percentile) this season.
So, even before his illness, Betts was trending in the wrong direction. A broken left hand that cost him nearly two months in 2024 might have been a contributing factor, but his squared-up rate indicated otherwise. In each of the past three seasons, it has ranked among the game’s best.
The worrisome part for Betts is that the combination of low bat speeds and high squared-up rates generally produces a hitter with the profile of Luis Arraez, Steven Kwan and Jacob Wilson — lots of contact, little power. Such players, of course, have value. Just not the same kind of value as Betts.
All of this, of course, is relative: Betts, even with his illness, entered Wednesday with an OPS+ that was 22 percent above league average — down from 65 percent above in 2023 and 44 percent above in ’24, but still darned good.
The season is barely 20 percent complete. Betts has regained all of his lost weight. His strikeout rate is at a career-best level. His bat speed was up in spring training, before he fell ill, and seems to be on the rise again.
Plenty of time remains for Betts to get back to being that rarest of baseball creatures — a 5-foot-9, 178-pound slugger. His worrying, though, is understandable. Bat speed isn’t everything. But a certain baseline is necessary for Betts to dominate the way he has his entire career.
(Top photo of Mookie Betts: Peter Joneleit / xIcon Sportswire via Getty Images)
This news was originally published on this post .
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