Feel-good story: Healthy Mookie caps ring night with walk-off HR

LOS ANGELES -- Just days before the Dodgers opened the domestic portion of their schedule, Mookie Betts was in poor shape. He had fallen sick ahead of the team's Cactus League finale, an undiagnosed illness that kept him out of the season-opening Tokyo Series and caused him to drop from 175 pounds to 157 in the span of about two weeks.

Betts felt better physically when he returned early from Japan, but he could not eat solid food without vomiting. When he was a late scratch from last Sunday's exhibition game against the Angels, it seemed questionable whether he would be ready in time for the continuation of the regular season.

Even though the Dodgers have learned to never count Betts out, they had their lingering doubts about him being at his best. But Betts turned a corner, and after being able to keep down food, he began to regain the weight he had lost. Not only was he ready in time for L.A.'s first home series, but he has shown few signs of being anything but his usual self.

Betts smacked a pair of go-ahead home runs in Friday's 8-5 win, including a three-run blast to walk off the Tigers in a 10-inning thriller. By ensuring that his team and the Dodger Stadium faithful would go home happy on ring night, Betts became the seventh player with multiple go-ahead homers in the eighth inning or later of a game in the expansion era (since 1961), per the Elias Sports Bureau.

For Betts, leading his team to victory on the evening they received their rings to commemorate the 2024 World Series didn't hold any extra meaning beyond winning a game. He's not one to be overcome with emotion in most cases. But the two-homer night resonated with him on a personal level.

"That was super special. I know it sounds super selfish, but more for me," Betts said. "I was just really proud of myself for coming in and playing underweight -- not that it’s a big deal to be underweight.

"But just the fight that I’ve been through, the ups and downs, the nights where I’m just crying because I’m sick, my wife there kind of holding me. That’s where that emotion comes from. Then obviously, winning for the boys. That’s where the rest of it comes."

Betts' first big swing was a tie-breaking solo shot in the eighth inning, one that seemingly completed the comeback after Freddie Freeman put the Dodgers on the board with a game-tying two-run blast off old friend Jack Flaherty two frames earlier.

But the Tigers retied the game against Tanner Scott in the ninth and went up by two in the 10th, leaving the Dodgers with work to do. It didn't take long for L.A. to knot things up once more, thanks to run-scoring knocks from Michael Conforto and Will Smith, who was in as a pinch-hitter on his 30th birthday.

That set the stage for Betts to work his magic.

"That was not on my bingo card," manager Dave Roberts said. "He just does some special things."

"He’s superhuman," third baseman Max Muncy said. "We were joking around that that first home run he hit was probably his best bulk that he’s got right now, with all the strength that he’s got. But he one-upped us. So we were all wrong on that one.”

The Dodgers are the ninth reigning World Series champions to be 4-0 or better to begin a season, according to the Elias Sports Bureau. The most recent to achieve that feat were the 1985 Tigers, who were undefeated through their first six games but ultimately missed the postseason.

The quest to repeating as champions won't be determined by the Dodgers' early regular-season games. But they've already had to show some grit to go undefeated through four contests, as their lineup was not at full strength in Tokyo without Freeman and Betts -- and the latter is still building back to where he was before his illness.

Betts now weighs around 165 pounds, still shy of where he would like to be but in a much better place than he was not long ago. If Friday's performance was any indication, he's still plenty capable of doing damage when he's not at his physical peak.

"I didn’t lose much strength. Relative for my weight, I’m still pretty strong," Betts said. "But if you can add on more weight, you can add on more strength. Right now, I’m just having fun hitting 160-pound homers."