With the Dodgers' Season on the Brink, Mookie Betts Needs to Show Up Tonight

If he doesn't, it's going to be a long offseason.

Mookie Betts needs to be Mookie Betts, or else tomorrow begins the countdown till pitchers and catchers report. (Photo By Winslow Townson/Getty Images)

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Hi friends-

There are three playoff games today, and they will be wild, as both the Dodgers and the Twins look to stave off elimination. The games will begin at 5 PM ET/2 PM PT, and paid subscribers can join us to chat during all three contests here:

The community we’ve built together is the best part of this newsletter. The chats have been awesome, and often have over 900 comments a day(!) So if you’re a baseball fan who wants to find intelligent and kind people to chat with during these games who will not curse you out or clown you regardless of who you root for, upgrade your membership from free to paid now to join the fun for the October stretch run. You can try it out by committing to a month for only $6, or the price of a latte. It’s fun, I promise:

Housekeeping:

• I *believe* I’ve mailed out all the signed copies of my Dodger book that you guys ordered from me. If some reason I did not respond to your email or you have not received a book you paid for, please write back to this email. If you would still like to order a signed, personalized book from me for $35 (that includes priority shipping anywhere in the U.S., and we can negotiate international), also respond to this email and let me know. After running out during the L.A. book talk with Joe Posnanski and Nick Offerman and Mike Schur, I restocked and I have a few left!

• We are starting an off-season book club! Our November selection is The Boys of Summer, by Roger Kahn. Our December choice is The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, Body, and the Healing of Trauma, by Bessel van der Kolk. So many of you have asked for a book club, and you’ve told me you want to read books on baseball but also mental and physical health and creativity—because we are multitaskers. We contain multitudes!

  So that’s what we will do! I just wanted to give you guys a heads-up because the season will be over in three weeks (CRIES) and I’m trying to mentally and emotionally prepare so we don’t all go spiraling into depression without seeing each other in the chats anymore. Substack has a really cool way to do book clubs over Zoom and over chat to make sure we include as many people as possible. The Boys of Summer discussion will happen at the end of November. The Body Keeps the Score chat will take place at the end of December.

• But we still have many more playoff games left, so let’s not go into off-season withdrawal yet!

It’s Oct. 11, and we need to talk about the Dodgers today because they’re on the verge of getting swept by the Diamondbacks. Did you see this coming?

No disrespect to the D-Backs but, come on. This is a veteran L.A. team that has owned Arizona for the better part of the past decade, yet they’re playing like they have bumble bees in their pants. They look uncomfortable. They look anxious. They look like me.

And by *they* I suppose I’m talking about Mookie Betts (ok, and Bobby Miller).The bullpen can look away because it is exempt from this narrative!

With Miller, I can understand it. He’s a rookie and the moment was too big for him. Search your soul. You know that at age 24, with your team down all its starting pitchers and the pressure on you to suddenly be the ace after opening the season in the minors, you’d be unable to locate any of your secondary pitches and just start throwing fastballs down the middle as well. And then you’d be pulled from the game down 3-0 having gotten four outs. It’s just science.

If you’re reading this, you may not have heard of Bobby Miller. But you have probably heard of Mookie Betts. He hit the ball so hard and so far in August that he almost stole the NL MVP award from Ronald Acuña Jr. who has amassed something like 50 homers and 400 steals this year. The guy who traded him away from Boston will probably have it etched on his tombstone.

Back in July, I was telling you guys the Dodgers stunk like hot garbage. They were in first place, so people laughed at me and said I was being dramatic. And when the Dodgers failed to make a move at the deadline for a frontline starting pitcher, I said it was as if they waved the white flag on this season. Not the white flag on the division, of course, because the NL West reeked this year. But after 11 straight seasons of making the playoffs, the Dodgers are now at a World Series-or-bust point. Fair or not, anything less feels like a failure. The Dodgers winning the NL West at this point is as exciting as, I don’t know, California voting for a Democrat or Oklahoma voting for a Republican. It’s only news if it *doesn’t* happen.

If you’re a fan of another team reading this right now and you’re rolling your eyes so hard that you just fell out of your chair, you’re right! These are quite literally champagne problems. Dodger fans are spoiled. But they are also used to being crushed in the playoffs. I myself had no real hope for this team’s October chances after season-ending injuries to Gavin Lux, Walker Buehler, Dustin May, Tony Gonsolin, Blake Treinen and, let’s face it, Clayton Kershaw. When Julio Urías got arrested and removed from the team, it only confirmed that, yep, this isn’t the year. It happens! You can’t win ‘em all. Especially not in baseball, where no team has even gone back-to-back since the ‘99/’00 Yankees.

Let’s not forget