‘It ain’t over yet’: Why Mookie Betts was dead set on returning to shortstop
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Alden Gonzalez
GLENDALE, Ariz. — Sometime around mid-August last year, Mookie Betts convened with the Los Angeles Dodgers‘ coaches. He had taken stock of what transpired while he rehabbed a broken wrist, surveyed his team’s roster and accepted what had become plainly obvious: He needed to return to right field.
For the better part of five months, Betts had immersed himself in the painstaking task of learning shortstop in the midst of a major league season. It was a process that humbled him but also invigorated him, one he had desperately wanted to see through. On the day he gave it up, Chris Woodward, at that point an advisor who had intermittently helped guide Betts through the transition, sought him out. He shook Betts’ hand, told him how much he respected his efforts and thanked him for the work.
“Oh, it ain’t over yet,” Betts responded. “For now it’s over, but we’re going to win the World Series, and then I’m coming back.”
Woodward, now the Dodgers’ full-time first-base coach and infield instructor, recalled that conversation from the team’s spring training complex at Camelback Ranch last week and smiled while thinking about how those words had come to fruition. The Dodgers captured a championship last fall, then promptly determined that Betts, the perennial Gold Glove outfielder heading into his age-32 season, would be the everyday shortstop on one of the most talented baseball teams ever assembled.
From November to February, Betts visited high school and collegiate infields throughout the L.A. area on an almost daily basis in an effort to solidify the details of a transition he did not have time to truly prepare for last season.
Pedro Montero, one of the Dodgers’ video coordinators, placed an iPad onto a tripod and aimed its camera in Betts’ direction while he repeatedly pelted baseballs into the ground with a fungo bat, then sent Woodward the clips to review from his home in Arizona. The three spoke almost daily.
By the time Betts arrived in spring training, Woodward noticed a “night and day” difference from one year to the next. But he still acknowledges the difficulty of what Betts is undertaking, and he noted that meaningful games will ultimately serve as the truest arbiter.
The Dodgers have praised Betts for an act they described as unselfish, one that paved the way for both Teoscar Hernandez and Michael Conforto to join their corner outfield and thus strengthen their lineup. Betts himself has said his move to shortstop is a function of doing “what I feel like is best for the team.” But it’s also clear that shouldering that burden — and all the second-guessing and scrutiny that will naturally accompany it — is something he wants.
He wants to be challenged. He wants to prove everybody wrong. He wants to bolster his legacy.
“Mookie wants to be the best player in baseball, and I don’t see why he wouldn’t want that,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. “I think if you play shortstop, with his bat, that gives him a better chance.”
ONLY 21 PLAYERS since 1900 have registered 100 career games in right field and 100 career games at shortstop, according to ESPN Research. It’s a list compiled mostly of lifelong utility men. The only one among them who came close to following Betts’ path might have been Tony Womack, an everyday right fielder in his age-29 season and an everyday shortstop in the three years that followed. But Womack had logged plenty of professional shortstop experience before then.
Through his first 12 years in professional baseball, Betts accumulated just 13 starts at shortstop, all of them in rookie ball and Low-A from 2011 to 2012. His path — as a no-doubt Hall of Famer and nine-time Gold Glove right fielder who will switch to possibly the sport’s most demanding position in his 30s — is largely without precedent. And yet the overwhelming sense around the Dodgers is that if anyone can pull it off, it’s him.
“Mookie’s different,” third baseman Max Muncy said. “I think this kind of challenge is really fun for him. I think he just really enjoys it. He’s had to put in a lot of hard work — a lot of work that people haven’t seen — but I just think he’s such a different guy when it comes to the challenge of it that he’s really enjoying it. When you look at how he approaches it, he’s having so much fun trying to get as good as he can be. There’s not really any question in anyone’s mind here that he’s going to be a very good defensive shortstop.”
Betts entered the 2024 season as the primary second baseman, a position to which he had long sought a return, but transitioned to shortstop on March 8, 12 days before the Dodgers would open their season from South Korea, after throwing issues began to plague Gavin Lux. Almost every day for the next three months, Betts put himself through a rigorous pregame routine alongside teammate Miguel Rojas and third-base coach Dino Ebel in an effort to survive at the position.
The metrics were unfavorable, scouts were generally unimpressed and traditional statistics painted an unflattering picture — all of which was to be expected. Simply put, Betts did not have the reps. He hadn’t spent significant time at shortstop since he was a teenager at Overton High School in Nashville, Tennessee. He was attempting to cram years of experience through every level of professional baseball into the space allotted to him before each game, a task that proved impossible.
Betts committed nine errors during his time at shortstop, eight of them the result of errant throws. He often lacked the proper footwork to put himself in the best position to throw accurately across the diamond, but the Dodgers were impressed by how quickly he seemed to grasp other aspects of the position that seemed more difficult for others — pre-pitch timing, range, completion of difficult plays.
Shortly after the Dodgers defeated the New York Yankees to win their first full-season championship since 1988, Betts sat down with Dodgers coaches and executives and expressed his belief that, if given the proper time, he would figure it out. And so it was.
“If Mook really wants to do something, he’s going to do everything he can to be an elite, elite shortstop,” Dodgers general manager Brandon Gomes said. “I’m not going to bet against that guy.”
THE FIRST TASK was determining what type of shortstop Betts would be. Woodward consulted with Ryan Goins, the current Los Angeles Angels infield coach who is one of Betts’ best friends. The two agreed that he should play “downhill,” attacking the baseball, making more one-handed plays and throwing largely on the run, a style that fit better for a transitioning outfielder.
During a prior stint on the Dodgers’ coaching staff, Woodward — the former Texas Rangers manager who rejoined the Dodgers staff after Los Angeles’ previous first-base coach, Clayton McCullough, became the Miami Marlins‘ manager in the offseason — implemented the same style with Corey Seager, who was widely deemed too tall to remain a shortstop.
“He doesn’t love the old-school, right-left, two-hands, make-sure-you-get-in-front-of-the-ball type of thing,” Woodward said of Betts. “It doesn’t make sense to him. And I don’t coach that way. I want them to be athletic, like the best athlete they can possibly be, so that way they can use their lower half, get into their legs, get proper direction through the baseball to line to first. And that’s what Mookie’s really good at.”
Dodger Stadium underwent a major renovation of its clubhouse space over the offseason, making the field unusable and turning Montero and Betts into nomads. From the second week of November through the first week of February, the two trained at Crespi Carmelite High School near Betts’ home in Encino, California, then Sierra Canyon, Los Angeles Valley College and, finally, Loyola High.
For a handful of days around New Year’s, Betts flew to Austin, Texas, to get tutelage from Troy Tulowitzki, the five-time All-Star and two-time Gold Glove Award winner whose mechanics Betts was drawn to. In early January, when widespread wildfires haunted the L.A. area, Betts flew to Glendale, Arizona, to train with Woodward in person.
Mostly, though, it was Montero as the eyes and ears on the ground and Woodward as the advisor from afar. Their sessions normally lasted about two hours in the morning, evolving from three days a week to five and continually ramping up in intensity. The goal for the first two months was to hone in on the footwork required to make a variety of different throws, but also to give Betts plenty of reps on every ground ball imaginable.
When January came, Betts began to carve out a detailed, efficient routine that would keep him from overworking when the games began. It accounted for every situation, included backup scenarios for uncontrollable events — when it rained, when there wasn’t enough time, when pregame batting practice stretched too long — and was designed to help Betts hold up. What was once hundreds of ground balls was pared down to somewhere in the neighborhood of 35, but everything was accounted for.
LAST YEAR, BETTS’ throws were especially difficult for Freddie Freeman to catch at first base, often cutting or sailing or darting. But when Freeman joined Betts in spring training, he noticed crisp throws that consistently arrived with backspin and almost always hit the designated target. Betts was doing a better job of getting his legs under him on batted balls hit in a multitude of directions. Also, Rojas said, he “found his slot.”
“Technically, talking about playing shortstop, finding your slot is very important because you’re throwing the ball from a different position than when you throw it from right field,” Rojas explained. “You’re not throwing the ball from way over the top or on the bottom. So he’s finding a slot that is going to work for him. He’s understanding now that you need a slot to throw the ball to first base, you need a slot to throw the ball to second base, you need a slot to throw the ball home and from the side.”
Dodgers super-utility player Enrique Hernandez has noticed a “more loose” Betts at shortstop this spring. Roberts said Betts is “two grades better” than he was last year, before a sprained left wrist placed him on the injured list on June 17 and prematurely ended his first attempt. Before reporting to spring training, Betts described himself as “a completely new person over there.”
“But we’ll see,” he added.
The games will be the real test. At that point, Woodward said, it’ll largely come down to trusting the work he has put in over the past four months. Betts is famously hard on himself, and so Woodward has made it a point to remind him that, as long as his process is sound, imperfection is acceptable.
“This is dirt,” Woodward will often tell him. “This isn’t perfect.”
The Dodgers certainly don’t need Betts to be their shortstop. If it doesn’t work out, he can easily slide back to second base. Rojas, the superior defender whose offensive production prompted Betts’ return to right field last season, can fill in on at least a part-time basis. So can Tommy Edman, who at this point will probably split his time between center field and second base, and so might Hyeseong Kim, the 26-year-old middle infielder who was signed out of South Korea this offseason.
But it’s clear Betts wants to give it another shot.
As Roberts acknowledged, “He certainly felt he had unfinished business.”
JIM ABBOTT IS sitting at his kitchen table, with his old friend Tim Mead. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, they were partners in an extraordinary exercise — and now, for the first time in decades, they are looking at a stack of letters and photographs from that period of their lives.
The letters are mostly handwritten, by children, from all over the United States and Canada, and beyond.
“Dear Mr. Abbott …”
“I have one hand too. … I don’t know any one with one hand. How do you feel about having one hand? Sometimes I feel sad and sometimes I feel okay about it. Most of the time I feel happy.”
“I am a seventh grader with a leg that is turned inwards. How do you feel about your arm? I would also like to know how you handle your problem? I would like to know, if you don’t mind, what have you been called?”
“I can’t use my right hand and most of my right side is paralyzed. … I want to become a doctor and seeing you makes me think I can be what I want to be.”
For 40 years, Mead worked in communications for the California Angels, eventually becoming vice president of media relations. His position in this department became a job like no other after the Angels drafted Abbott out of the University of Michigan in 1988.
There was a deluge of media requests. Reporters from around the world descended on Anaheim, most hoping to get one-on-one time with the young left-handed pitcher with the scorching fastball. Every Abbott start was a major event — “like the World Series,” Angels scout Bob Fontaine Jr. remembers. Abbott, with his impressive amateur résumé (he won the James E. Sullivan Award for the nation’s best amateur athlete in 1997 and an Olympic gold medal in 1988) and his boyish good looks, had star power.
That spring, he had become only the 16th player to go straight from the draft to the majors without appearing in a single minor league game. And then there was the factor that made him unique. His limb difference, although no one called it that back then. Abbott was born without a right hand, yet had developed into one of the most promising pitchers of his generation. He would go on to play in the majors for ten years, including a stint in the mid ’90s with the Yankees highlighted by a no-hitter in 1993.
Abbott, and Mead, too, knew the media would swarm. That was no surprise. There had been swarms in college, and at the Olympics, wherever and whenever Abbott pitched. Who could resist such an inspirational story? But what they hadn’t anticipated were the letters.
The steady stream of letters. Thousands of letters. So many from kids who, like Abbott, were different. Letters from their parents and grandparents. The kids hoping to connect with someone who reminded them of themselves, the first celebrity they knew of who could understand and appreciate what it was like to be them, someone who had experienced the bullying and the feelings of otherness. The parents and grandparents searching for hope and direction.
“I know you don’t consider yourself limited in what you can do … but you are still an inspiration to my wife and I as parents. Your success helps us when talking to Andy at those times when he’s a little frustrated. I’m able to point to you and assure him there’s no limit to what he can accomplish.”
In his six seasons with the Angels, Abbott was assisted by Mead in the process of organizing his responses to the letters, mailing them, and arranging face-to-face meetings with the families who had written to him. There were scores of such meetings. It was practically a full-time job for both of them.
“Thinking back on these meetings with families — and that’s the way I’d put it, it’s families, not just kids — there was every challenge imaginable,” Abbott, now 57, says. “Some accidents. Some birth defects. Some mental challenges that aren’t always visible to people when you first come across somebody. … They saw something in playing baseball with one hand that related to their own experience. I think the families coming to the ballparks were looking for hopefulness. I think they were looking for what it had been that my parents had told me, what it had been that my coaches had told me. … [With the kids] it was an interaction. It was catch. It was smiling. It was an autograph. It was a picture. With the parents, it ran deeper. With the parents, it was what had your parents said to you? What coaches made a difference? What can we expect? Most of all, I think, what can we expect?”
“It wasn’t asking for autographs,” Mead says of all those letters. “They weren’t asking for pictures. They were asking for his time. He and I had to have a conversation because this was going to be unique. You know, you could set up another player to come down and sign 15 autographs for this group or whatever. But it was people, parents, that had kids, maybe babies, just newborn babies, almost looking for an assurance that this is going to turn out all right, you know. ‘What did your parents do? How did your parents handle this?'”
One of the letters Abbott received came from an 8-year-old girl in Windsor, Ontario.
She wrote, “Dear Jim, My name is Tracey Holgate. I am age 8. I have one hand too. My grandpa gave me a picture of you today. I saw you on TV. I don’t know anyone with one hand. How do you feel about having one hand? Sometimes I feel sad and sometimes I feel okay about it. Most of the time I feel happy. I hope to see you play in Detroit and maybe meet you. Could you please send me a picture of you in uniform? Could you write back please? Here is a picture of me. Love, Tracey.”
Holgate’s letter is one of those that has remained preserved in a folder — and now Abbott is reading it again, at his kitchen table, half a lifetime after receiving it. Time has not diminished the power of the letter, and Abbott is wiping away tears.
Today, Holgate is 44 and goes by her married name, Dupuis. She is married with four children of her own. She is a teacher. When she thinks about the meaning of Jim Abbott in her life, it is about much more than the letter he wrote back to her. Or the autographed picture he sent her. It was Abbott, all those years ago, who made it possible for Tracey to dream.
“There was such a camaraderie there,” she says, “an ability to connect with somebody so far away doing something totally different than my 8-year-old self was doing, but he really allowed me to just feel that connection, to feel that I’m not alone, there’s other people that have differences and have overcome them and been successful and we all have our own crosses, we all have our own things that we’re carrying and it’s important to continue to focus on the gifts that we have, the beauty of it.
“I think sometimes differences, disabilities, all those things can be a gift in a package we would never have wanted, because they allow us to be people that have an empathetic heart, an understanding heart, and to see the pain in the people around us.”
Now, years after Abbott’s career ended, he continues to inspire.
Among those he influenced, there are professional athletes, such as Shaquem Griffin, who in 2018 became the first NFL player with one hand. Griffin, now 29, played three seasons at linebacker for the Seattle Seahawks.
Growing up in Florida, he would watch videos of Abbott pitching and fielding, over and over, on YouTube.
“The only person I really looked up to was Jim Abbott at the time,” Griffin says, “which is crazy, because I didn’t know anybody else to look up to. I didn’t know anybody else who was kind of like me. And it’s funny, because when I was really little, I used to be like, ‘Why me? Why this happen to me?’ And I used to be in my room thinking about that. And I used to think to myself, ‘I wonder if Jim Abbott had that same thought.'”
Carson Pickett was born on Sept. 15, 1993 — 11 days after Abbott’s no-hitter. Missing most of her left arm below the elbow, she became, in 2022, the first player with a limb difference to appear for the U.S. women’s national soccer team.
She, too, says that Abbott made things that others told her were impossible seem attainable.
“I knew I wanted to be a professional soccer player,” says Pickett, who is currently playing for the NWSL’s Orlando Pride. “To be able to see him compete at the highest level it gave me hope, and I think that that kind of helped me throughout my journey. … I think ‘pioneer’ would be the best word for him.”
Longtime professional MMA fighter Nick Newell is 39, old enough to have seen Abbott pitch for the Yankees. In fact, when Newell was a child he met Abbott twice, first at a fan event at the Jacob Javits Center in Manhattan and then on a game day at Yankee Stadium. Newell was one of those kids with a limb difference — like Griffin and Pickett, due to amniotic band syndrome — who idolized Abbott.
“And I didn’t really understand the gravity of what he was doing,” Newell says now, “but for me, I saw someone out there on TV that looked like I did. And I was the only other person I knew that had one hand. And I saw this guy out here playing baseball and it was good to see somebody that looked like me, and I saw him in front of the world.
“He was out there like me and he was just living his life and I think that I owe a lot of my attitude and the success that I have to Jim just going out there and being the example of, ‘Hey, you can do this. Who’s to say you can’t be a professional athlete?’ He’s out there throwing no-hitters against the best baseball players in the world. So, as I got older, ‘Why can’t I wrestle? Why can’t I fight? Why can’t I do this?’ And then it wasn’t until the internet that I heard people tell me I can’t do these things. But by then I had already been doing those things.”
Griffin.
Pickett.
Newell.
Just three of the countless kids who were inspired by Jim Abbott.
When asked if it ever felt like too much, being a role model and a hero, all the letters and face-to-face meetings, Abbott says no — but it wasn’t always easy.
“I had incredible people who helped me send the letters,” he says. “I got a lot more credit sometimes than I deserved for these interactions, to be honest with you. And that happened on every team, particularly with my friend Tim Mead. There was a nice balance to it. There really was. There was a heaviness to it. There’s no denying. There were times I didn’t want to go [to the meetings]. I didn’t want to walk out there. I didn’t want to separate from my teammates. I didn’t want to get up from the card game. I didn’t want to put my book down. I liked where I was at. I was in my environment. I was where I always wanted to be. In a big league clubhouse surrounded by big league teammates. In a big league stadium. And those reminders of being different, I slowly came to realize were never going to go away.”
But being different was the thing that made Abbott more than merely a baseball star. For many people, he has been more than a role model, more than an idol. He is the embodiment of hope and belonging.
“I think more people need to realize and understand the gift of a difference,” Dupuis says. “I think we have to just not box everybody in and allow everybody’s innate light to shine, and for whatever reasons we’ve been created to be here, [let] that light shine in a way that it touches everybody else. Because I think that’s what Jim did. He allowed his light to permeate and that light, in turn, lit all these little children’s lights all over the world, so you have this boom of brightness that’s happening and that’s uncontrollable, that’s beautiful.”
NEW YORK — Chicago Cubs center fielder Pete Crow-Armstrong is projected to receive the largest amount from this season’s $50 million pre-arbitration bonus pool based on his regular-season statistics.
Crow-Armstrong is on track to get $1,091,102, according to WAR calculations through July 8 that Major League Baseball sent to teams, players and agents in a memo Friday that was obtained by The Associated Press.
He earned $342,128 from the pool in 2024.
“I was aware of it after last year, but I have no clue of the numbers,” he said Friday. “I haven’t looked at it one time.”
Pittsburgh pitcher Paul Skenes is second at $961,256, followed by Washington outfielder James Wood ($863,835), Arizona outfielder Corbin Carroll ($798,397), Houston pitcher Hunter Brown ($786,838), Philadelphia pitcher Cristopher Sánchez ($764,854), Cincinnati shortstop Elly De La Cruz ($717,479), Boston catcher Carlos Narváez ($703,007), Red Sox outfielder Ceddanne Rafaela ($685,366) and Detroit outfielder Riley Greene ($665,470).
Crow-Armstrong, Skenes, Wood, Carroll, Brown, De La Cruz and Greene have been picked for Tuesday’s All-Star Game.
A total of 100 players will receive the payments, established as part of the 2022 collective bargaining agreement and aimed to get more money to players without sufficient service time for salary arbitration eligibility. The cutoff for 2025 was 2 years, 132 days of major league service.
Players who signed as foreign professionals are excluded.
Most young players have salaries just above this year’s major league minimum of $760,000. Crow-Armstrong has a $771,000 salary this year, Skenes $875,000, Wood $764,400 and Brown $807,400.
Carroll is in the third season of a $111 million, eight-year contract.
As part of the labor agreement, a management-union committee was established that determined the WAR formula used to allocate the bonuses after awards. (A player may receive only one award bonus per year, the highest one he is eligible for.) The agreement calls for an interim report to be distributed the week before the All-Star Game.
Distribution for awards was $9.85 million last year, down from $11.25 million in 2022 and $9.25 million in 2023.
A player earns $2.5 million for winning an MVP or Cy Young award, $1.75 million for finishing second, $1.5 million for third, $1 million for fourth or fifth or for making the All-MLB first team. A player can get $750,000 for winning Rookie of the Year, $500,000 for second or for making the All-MLB second team, $350,000 for third in the rookie race, $250,000 for fourth or $150,000 for fifth.
Kansas City shortstop Bobby Witt Jr. topped last year’s pre-arbitration bonus pool at $3,077,595, and Skenes was second at $2,152,057 despite not making his big league debut until May 11. Baltimore shortstop Gunnar Henderson was third at $2,007,178.
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