Mookie Betts might be getting ahead of himself with big goal for Dodgers’ 2025 season

Mookie Betts is a six-time Gold Glover in right field. He has a career 13.8 dWAR in right field, which ranks in him the top 130 position players ever by that metric. Any play he's ever made that's been so good it ends up in highlight reels? Those were made in right field.

This is what has made the Dodgers' — and Betts', for that matter — insistence on playing him at shortstop so thoroughly frustrating. It started during spring training last season, when Gavin Lux made it clear that he was not going to be LA's next Corey Seager or Trea Turner, but while moving Betts was questionable with Miguel Rojas and Kiké Hernández right there on the bench, it was slightly more forgiveable under the assumption that it would just be temporary.

At mid-season last year, it seemed like it was. After he returned from a two-month absence with a broken hand, the Dodgers reinstalled him back in the outfield and let Rojas and Nick Ahmed take over at short. However, they quickly changed their mind this offseason and publicly announced that they would be making the switch again.

At DodgerFest, Betts said his goal for the season was to win a Gold Glove at shortstop. We might be getting ahead of ourselves there, guy.

Mookie Betts said his goal with Dodgers in 2025 is to win a Gold Glove at shortstop

The eye test is one thing (and he sure didn't look great to the naked eye), but the numbers also say that Betts isn't a great shortstop. Last year, he committed nine errors there, which represents almost half of the total errors he's made in his entire career. Right before he was injured, he ranked dead last among 24 qualified shortstops in multiple defensive categories including fielding run value.

Maybe this is harsh. It was just Betts' first season at a brand new position, and he could always improve. However, it's hard to keeping him there when the Dodgers have made it clear that they could buy a better defensive shortstop (or, again, just put Rojas back there) but decline to do so.

The Dodgers' "potential Achilles heel" this season has already been identified as their defense, and it's clear that they're usually loathe to sacrifice power at the plate for defensive prowess. But they still signed Hyeseong Kim, a guy who isn't known for his power, only to not play him regularly at a position he spent almost 2,000 innings at in the KBO. Please, make it make sense, Dodgers.

If Betts wins a Gold Glove for his work at shortstop this season, that's great. He'll have proved the haters wrong. But neither he nor the Dodgers should ask fans to have a lot of confidence that's going to happen.