Mookie Betts to Play Second Base Tonight at Arizona
There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. Dave Roberts is controlling transmission. If he wishes to make it louder, he will bring up the volume...you are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to the Roberts limits.
So yeah, you read that correctly. Mookie Betts is scheduled to start tonight's game versus the DBacks at second base. I use the word "scheduled" because it's possible that Mr. Roberts will be hindered in the limits of his imagination and be transported to the The Twilight Zone, where there is a stop sign up ahead and reverse course.
"[Mookie] takes grounders everyday in the infield," said Roberts twice for emphasis (see video above).
Betts also has eight doubles, 14 home runs, and 33 runs scored, and with however many other times he's reached as far as second base while Los Angeles is on offense, it's safe to say he's seen the keystone a good 50 or 60 times in 2020.
Plus, well, Mookie made 14 starts at second for the 2014 Boston Red Sox, God bless em. A grand total of 122 innings six years ago, with three errors (which translates to 35 errors in a 162-game season) and a glistening fielding percentage of .955. To give you an idea, in the worst year of his career (see yips), Steve Sax committed 30 errors and fielded .961 in 1983.
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Gamesmanship? Maybe, if you think Roberts has a chance to make San Diego shiver at the prospect. More likely, however, this is an example of the Dodgers' leader being weird. Remember the Joc-Pederson-at-first-base experiment. That was weird. This is equally as weird.
If Betts were to be injured while playing second base tonight, tomorrow or at some other time prior to October, the decision will go from being weird and maybe a little fun to catastrophic and monumentally stupid. Because in case you hadn't noticed, L.A. has five men who can and do play second base, in Gavin Lux, Max Muncy, Chris Taylor, Kiké Hernandez and Austin Barnes. They don't need a sixth. Not for a game, not for an inning, not a single time, never.
And I'm no longer sure that glove conquers all.
Howard Cole has been writing about baseball on the internet since Y2K. Follow him on Twitter.
Video courtesy of Spectrum SportsNetLA/Los Angeles Dodgers.
