1,426 days.
That’s how long it’s been since Mookie Betts played his last game in a Red Sox uniform — though no one knew that for certain at the time — and gave Boston one last magical moment, just in case it was goodbye. Racing around the bases from first to home on a Rafael Devers grounder gone haywire, Betts dove headfirst into home plate for the winning run, then bounced back up, roaring joyfully to the adoring crowd as his teammates rushed out of the dugout to envelope him.
How had it already been 1,426 days?
The Red Sox – Dodgers series at Fenway Park this weekend is a reunion or homecoming for several players and staff on each side. Kenley Jansen and Justin Turner played 12 and nine years in Los Angeles, respectively. Their manager, Dave Roberts, was Dodgers teammates with Red Sox manager Alex Cora in 2004, of all seasons. Roberts’ current squad includes Kiké Hernández, who’s back in Los Angeles after a midseason trade from Boston, and four members of the Red Sox team that beat the Dodgers in the 2018 World Series: J.D. Martinez, Joe Kelly, Ryan Brasier…
Betts.
His presence this weekend is the homecoming years in the making. He is the homegrown one. He, by virtue of his talent and character, and the impact of that trade — the most stunning fire sale in Boston since Babe Ruth almost exactly 101 years prior — is the one Boston has been waiting 1,426 days to see again.
“It’s a big night for him,” Cora said on Friday afternoon. “That first at-bat is gonna be something that he will remember forever.”
As Betts stepped up to the plate for the first time in Dodger blue, he tipped his hat and held his hands up in the shape of a heart shape to the crowd. Cora applauded from the dugout, Devers from third base, a huge smile on his face.
Perhaps not since Ruth’s first game at Fenway in Yankees pinstripes had there been such a highly-anticipated return. Because as great a player as Betts was in Boston, it’s about much more than the numbers, though they were stellar: .301 average, .893 OPS, 965 hits, 229 doubles, 139 home runs in 794 regular-season games. Four consecutive All-Star and Gold Glove seasons between 2016-19, American League MVP votes each year between 2015-19, including a second-place finish in ’16 and a win in ’18. In Boston’s ’18 championship season, he became the first player in MLB history to win a World Series, batting title, and MVP, Gold Glove, and Silver Slugger awards in the same year.
Then there’s his leadership in the clubhouse and the off-field contributions, like hours after the Red Sox won Game 2 of the ’18 World Series (against the Dodgers), when he quietly went to Copley Square with trays of hot food for homeless people outside the Boston Public Library.
“Everything he did here, it was outstanding,” Cora said. “He did it with class, he was really good for us on the field, he was really good for us off the field.”
Betts embraced Boston in every aspect of his life, and then, suddenly, he was gone. But after the abruptness of the trade, nearly four years elapsed before this weekend.
“It took so long before I came back that I didn’t really have much of a choice,” he said on Friday afternoon. “The trade happened in the offseason, the COVID hit, then had another kid… I think slowly, it kind of just went to the back of my mind.
“I think all the circumstances that allowed it, allowed me to have closure a little easier.”
Returning to an almost completely different team probably helps, too. Betts wasn’t even the first departure from that 2018 team that won a franchise record 108 games en route to the organization’s fourth championship this century. By now, he has more former fellow champs with him in LA than remain in Boston.
“There’s so many new faces in there, man,” Betts said when asked if he’d seen the newly-renovated Red Sox clubhouse. “Devers and Sale, is that it? Yeah, that’s crazy.
“That just the way the cookie kind of crumbled. Priorities changed, and things changed, and players change. It’s hard to, nobody really keeps a team together forever, right?”
The Mookie Betts who came back to Fenway this weekend is, in many ways, the same guy who played here half a decade ago. He’s still an elite player, sure to get National League MVP votes this fall, if not the award itself, and a committed philanthropist. He’s also 30 years old now, a married father of two, and a podcaster with his own production company.
“I don’t want to be towards the end of my career and not know what I want to do, not have an idea at least,” he explained. Being in LA, he said, opened up a lot of creative doors to him that may never have materialized here.
“I’m sure there’s a ton of opportunities in Boston, but LA is just different,” he said carefully. “So I don’t know, I don’t know that I’d be the person I am today if I’d stayed in Boston… it is what it is.”
Whether he’d be the same person if he’d stayed is impossible to know, but his former manager knows the quality of his character is unchanged. When Cora was named as the “only non-player involved” in the Houston Astros’ sign-stealing scandal, he and the Red Sox “mutually agreed to part ways.” That was January 2020, just weeks before they ended up trading Betts. Unlike many people in Cora’s life, the young star was still in his corner.
“(He’s) one of the few that actually, when the whole thing happened with me, called me, was there for me,” Cora revealed. “That’s when I knew who is who, you know, and who is who around me.
“He was one of the few that stayed in contact and made sure Alex was doing well, and I will always appreciate it,” the manager added, referring to himself by his first name as if to emphasize that Betts’ concern for him was on a more personal level than simply player and manager.
The two still keep in touch about “twice a month,” and Cora sees their current relationship as “a bigger brother kind of thing… He will give me a call whenever he needs help.”
Betts has come a long way since June 29, 2014, when he was just a 21-year-old kid making his Major League debut in a Red Sox uniform.
Asked what he would say to his younger self now, he isn’t quite sure. “Honestly, I would probably tell him, I feel like that kid was a good kid, man. I feel like that that kid did a lot of things the right way, he lived his life the right way,” he said thoughtfully. “I’m very happy that I am where I am, very happy, very proud of who I am right now.”
“That was a very, very dope chapter in my life,” he said. “But the chapter I’m in right now, I’m enjoying this so much. I love this so much, and I wouldn’t trade it for the world.”