The Dodgers outfielder can dunk, catch passes from a quarterback and bowl perfect games. Luckily for MLB, he stuck with baseball
Baseball is extraordinarily lucky to have Mookie Betts. It’s not just the fact that Betts is, once again, in the World Series and providing memorable highlights. It’s not even that baseball, trapped in a crisis partly of its own invention, was in desperate need of a player as exciting and charismatic as Betts to step up on its biggest stage. It’s also just the fact that as great as Betts is at baseball, and he’s otherworldly, we have so much evidence that he could do practically anything. He didn’t necessarily need the game.
Betts is arguably the most talented all-round athletes in America. When he is not busy making incredible game-saving catches in back-to-back playoff games, Betts happens to spend his time as a professional bowler and has rolled a perfect game (that’s 12 strikes in a row) at the World Series of Bowling. Like many gifted athletes, Betts played both baseball and basketball in high school, and his coach has said that he could have gone on to be a highly-rated point guard had he pursued the game in college. He can even dunk, which isn’t that impressive if you’re 6ft 8in like LeBron James but an incredible feat if, like Betts, you’re only 5ft 9in.
Related: The exquisite catharsis of watching Clayton Kershaw fail to implode
