Marvelous Mookie making the unprecedented look easy

This continues to be a time of such amazing talent in baseball, all over the map. This is the time of Shohei Ohtani, the kind of two-way talent baseball hasn’t seen since Babe Ruth. It is the time of Aaron Judge hitting more home runs in a season for the Yankees than The Babe ever did. It’s the time of Ronald Acuña Jr. and Juan Soto and Mike Trout and ... well, you know how much longer the list is than that. They’re all right there for us, every day.

And leading off for the Dodgers and playing shortstop now is Mookie Betts, somebody we don’t talk nearly enough about as one of the best players ever, in any time.

Betts has been a great outfielder -- and that means a truly great outfielder -- in Boston and Los Angeles. He is a former Most Valuable Player and two-time World Series champ and what he has done now, moving from outfield to shortstop at the age of 31, is something no player of his caliber has ever done, certainly not in mid-career.

“I feel like this is uncharted territory,” Betts said this week to Alex Speier of the Boston Globe.

Then Betts added this: “I see myself as a really good athlete who can do anything -- especially on the baseball field.”

Betts had played some shortstop in the Red Sox farm system, in Class A Short Season Lowell, 12 years ago. He became a second baseman in the Minors after that, before finding a home in right field at Fenway Park, on his way to become as brilliant an all-around talent as the Red Sox has ever had, having his MVP year on the best Red Sox team of all time, back in 2018.

Then, of course, they traded him to the Dodgers reminiscent of the way they’d sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees once. Now he bats ahead of Ohtani, the new Ruth, in Dave Roberts’ batting order, and Ohtani bats ahead of Freddie Freeman. Three MVP’s, one right after another. All that star power is why Betts can get overlooked sometimes, even now, when he is the game’s best player in the early season.

Robin Yount was a shortstop who went to the outfield and kept going all the way to Cooperstown. No one can ever remember somebody of Betts’ immense stature (even though he’s 5-foot-9) ever going the other way.

I asked his manager about that the other day. This is what Dave Roberts told me, after immediately citing Yount going in the other direction:

“Mookie is extremely rare. And watching him play shortstop now, it’s starting to look more like his natural position.”

We talk about five-tool players in baseball. Now it is as if Mookie Betts has six. He has done it in Boston and won there and done it in Los Angeles and won there. Betts has started this season with a .415 batting average, 17 hits, 15 runs, five homers and 11 RBIs in 11 games. He currently has a 1.441 OPS, a .902 slugging percentage and an on-base percentage of .538. He has also walked 11 times this season.

Betts is a seven-time All-Star, a six-time Silver Slugger Award winner, he has six Gold Glove Awards. In 2018 with the Red Sox, Mookie became the first player to ever win an MVP, Silver Slugger, Gold Glove, batting title and World Series title all in the same year. Three other times he has finished second in the MVP voting. He has scored more than 100 runs six times, knocked in 100 runs three times, hit more than 30 homers four times and nearly got to 40 last season.

If you remember the 2020 World Series when Los Angeles faced Tampa Bay, you know the Dodgers would not have won their first Series since 1988 without Betts doing everything he did, at the plate and on the bases and in the outfield. In Game 6 that year, he had a big double in the sixth inning that finally turned the series the Dodgers' way, then raced home later in the inning from third on a ground ball to first base. In the eighth inning, he capped off what had been a spectacular postseason for him with a home run. When it was over, his teammate Kiké Hernández summed up what we had all seen:

“Mookie Betts is the real deal.”

And a very big deal, even at his size. Betts continues to make history, be as much of a force in the field as he is at the plate and on the bases. On top of all that, he plays the game with the kind of pure joy that Willie Mays once did. When the Dodgers needed him to be a second baseman last season, he became a second baseman again. When they needed a shortstop this season, no one was surprised when he raised a hand. After all the game he’s shown us in his career, now he shows us even more.

Six-tool player in a game where we celebrate five. Again: So much talent in baseball right now. No bigger talent than Mookie is. Even playing a position as hard as short, he continues to make the game look easy.