Dodgers Interview: Mookie has his clutch moment

TORONTO — Mookie Betts needed just one swing to turn his postseason around. He found it in the third inning and ripped a two-out, two-run single that stood as the swing of Game 6. Betts himself wasn’t exactly doing backflips about it, but he definitely was in better spirits than in LA. “It felt all right today,” he said. “We’ll see about tomorrow. I was hitting all day yesterday, and just to get it to show up today in a big spot was really refreshing.” He made sure to point back to the traffic in front of him. “Shout out to the boys for getting on base and creating some traffic for the moment.”

He kept the night in perspective, because the calendar demands it. “It just gave us another game,” Betts said. “We can’t really roll anything into another game. That team over there is really good, and we know they’re going to come out ready to go. We should be ready to go, too.”

This one felt like playoff baseball in a bottle. Mookie grinned at the chaos and the calm, sometimes in the same breath. “That was just a really good baseball game,” he said. “Great pitching from both sides, not a whole lot of offense. I know they still collected a lot of hits as they always do, but we were able to keep them from building innings.” The final frame had him shaking his head. “In that last inning, Kiké came up with a big play. Glas came in and I think he only threw like three pitches. That was a really good team win, and it’s fun to be a part of games like that.”

Why does this group keep answering when the series leans the wrong way? He went straight to the room. “I don’t know that you can really describe it outside of love, the love for each other,” he said. “If you could feel what I feel in the clubhouse, you would understand. It comes from love.”

Tomorrow is Game 7. Kids dream about it. Veterans manage the nerves. Betts didn’t pretend otherwise. “It all kind of resets,” he said. “It’s one game. May the best man win and we’ll see what happens tomorrow.” Then he let a little of the honesty slip through. “Right now I don’t have any thoughts. I just want to go home and lay down. Tomorrow will come when tomorrow comes, and I’m sure I’ll have a lot of anxiety and all these other things, just like every game I play. It’s stuff we dream about, and I’m sure we’ll all be excited.”

The personal side mattered to him, too, but not the way you might expect. “It felt great,” he said of the big swing. “Just to come through for the boys. Obviously I would love to play well for myself, but that’s kind of irrelevant. I really want to play well for the boys because I love everybody in there. I know how much we lean on each other, and when they’re leaning on me, I want to come through for them. To come through today felt really good.”

Reporters asked what changed under the hood after a week of searching. Betts kept it simple. “I was able to pull the ball,” he said. “I hadn’t really been able to pull the ball. I can’t even say I pulled it that much today, but I guess I pulled one. I was able to get some good swings off, some A-swings, some athletic swings, and it worked today.” Why was pulling it so tough lately? He shrugged. “If I knew that, we would not be talking about me struggling. It worked today. We’ll see about tomorrow.”

And that ninth inning? Wild on top of wild. “That was just a wild inning and a wild ending,” he said. “Between the ball getting wedged under there and the game-ending double play, it was crazy. It kind of worked out that it got wedged under there. Just a crazy inning and crazy plays.”

So Game 7 waits. Betts didn’t dress it up or talk big. He sounded like a cleanup hitter who liked the feel of the bat again and trusted the guys around him to make the next play. “One game,” he said. “We’ll be ready to go.”

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