BOSTON — “When Mookie’s smiling, good things are happening,” said Red Sox manager Alex Cora after his club’s 7-5 win over the Astros in Game 2 of the ALCS on Sunday.
Right fielder Mookie Betts was decidedly not smiling in his team’s clubhouse after a Game 1 loss on Saturday. Betts, speaking quietly to the mob of reporters at his locker, stressed then that the Red Sox managed to move on from tough losses throughout their 108-win season and that he believed they would do it in this series, but sounded hard on himself for grounding out with the bases loaded and Justin Verlander seemingly on the ropes in the fifth inning.
“I just didn’t get the job done,” Betts said Saturday. “It was a fastball right down the middle, I just didn’t put a good swing on it, and didn’t get the job done. I need to do my part. I haven’t been doing it.”
Betts, the presumptive favorite for the AL MVP Award after a regular season that saw him hit .346 with a 1.078 OPS, entered Sunday’s Game 2 only 4-for-20 – a .200 average – with one extra-base hit in the 2018 postseason.
But players like Betts don’t stay cold long. Before Sunday’s game, Astros manager A.J. Hinch called the outfielder “one of the most dynamic hitters of the game” and a “ticking time bomb” in the series. The 26-year-old needed all of five pitches to explode on Sunday.
Leading off against Astros starter Gerrit Cole, Betts worked a 3-1 count before lacing a 96-mph fastball off the center-field wall for a double. He’d come around to score the Red Sox’s first run on an Andrew Benintendi single one batter later.
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