NEW YORK — Mookie Betts has a simple philosophy about hitting.
“Can’t find it if you’re not looking,” he says.
For Betts, that search means taking hundreds of swings a day when he feels he’s not contributing the way he should. At various times this postseason – which began with him mired in an 0-for-22 postseason slump that weighed heavily on his mind – he has referred to taking anywhere from “a couple hundred swings a day” to 500 swings in one day.
Do the math.
A conservative pace during a normal batting practice session would be five swings per minute. To get to 500 swings then would take 100 minutes. That kind of workout can tax the hands, the forearms, the legs – and the mind.
“No, that came from me,” Betts said when asked if someone had suggested his carpet bombing approach to addressing any dissatisfaction with his swing. “Nobody recommends that.”
Betts’ good friend and hitting mentor, Mets designated hitter J.D. Martinez, is legendary for the hours he spends in the batting cage daily. But Martinez said his standard approach would be to take four or five swings then step out of the cage and review his swings on a tablet before stepping back in.
There are times when he does that, too, Betts said – but sometimes it is a high-volume search for answers.
“It just depends on where I’m at, what day it is, what we’re working on,” he said. “There’s not necessarily a method. It’s just madness in there.
“That’s what I know. I work.”
The madness has worked. Betts said he has continued to take hundreds of swings each day during the postseason – “probably taking way too many, but I’d rather do that.”
“If I’m not hitting, I’m thinking about hitting,” he said. “So I might as well be in the cage.”
Since breaking his 0-for-22 postseason slide, Betts has gone 12 for 34 (.353) with four home runs in the past eight games, making this one of the best postseason performances of his career.
“Amazing,” fellow outfielder Teoscar Hernandez said of watching Betts’ work ethic. “You learn a lot from a guy that’s won MVPs, World Series. All the awards that you can think about in baseball, he has it. He’s just Mookie. He does special things.”
In the first half of the season, Betts took a similar approach to learning how to play shortstop. He spent extra hours on the field long before game time, taking ground balls the way he takes swings in the cage, trying to accumulate the experience at the position he lacked.
The question then was the same – wasn’t he worried about overdoing it?
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“I don’t care about overdoing it. I’d rather overdo it than not give effort,” he says now of his hitting work. “Pretty much as soon as I get to the park I’m in the cage and I don’t leave until I go back on the field. And I come back inside and I hit some more. That’s what I’ve been doing.”
He is also not worried about the extra work wearing down his 5-foot-9, 170-pound body. At 32, he said he takes care of his body better than he ever has. He begins each day with a yoga-like stretching and flexibility program that he adopted this spring after working with Osamu Yada – the personal trainer known as ‘Yada Sensei’ who works with Yoshinobu Yamamoto, creating much of his unique workout regimen featuring wooden blocks, weighted soccer balls and lawn dart-esque javelins.
“Especially in a time like now, there’s not very many tomorrows. They run out pretty quick,” Betts said. “So I’m really just trying to do what I can to help us, and the last thing I want to do is not give it 100, 110 percent.
“It’s not something that I want to do. I don’t want to go in there and hit all day. But it’s something that, based off of my play, I need to do.”