Mookie Betts felt like he had done everything right in the bottom of the sixth inning Tuesday evening.

He timed up a first-pitch cutter that Rays right-hander Drew Rasmussen left right down the middle. He took an aggressive swing that sent the ball screaming off his bat at 101.3 mph. He scorched a line drive that, according to MLB’s Baseball Savant system, had an expected batting average of .640 — the kind of contact that should have gone for a hit more than six times out of 10.

This, however, was not one of those occasions.

Just as Betts broke out of the box, he looked up to see Rays infielder Taylor Walls snare the ball for a lineout at shortstop.

“You just kind of have to live with that,” Betts said a day later. “It sucks living with. But what else can you do?”

Such has been the story of Betts’ season this year, one that has seen the former MVP continue to lag well behind his typical offensive production.

Through 40 games (he missed more than a month with an oblique strain in April), the 33-year-old is hitting just .203. That’s 85 points below his career average and 55 points worse than his career-worst mark of .258 in 2025.

His quality of contact, however, suggests his numbers should be much better.

According to Baseball Savant, Betts’ expected batting average (which accounts for exit velocity and launch angle) was .269 at the start of play Wednesday. The 66-point gap between his actual and expected average was the biggest in baseball. 

In other words, he might be the unluckiest hitter in the sport now.

That doesn’t mean it’s a coincidence.

Betts is aware of his extreme analytics, having received constant reminders of them from the Dodgers’ hitting staff as he tries to turn his season around.

“The coaches are trying to help keep me positive, which I wholeheartedly appreciate,” he said in an interview with The California Post on Wednesday. 

At the same time, though, he noted that expected statistics are “not real.”

“I want to keep hitting it hard and throwing my hat in the ring for hits, which [you do by] hitting it hard and on the right angle and all that,” he said. “But I also want to win the game. So a bloop sometimes is better.”

To Betts, there’s a reason behind the bad fortune.

Too often, he feels, he has been “cutting my swing off” and “not staying through [the ball], staying inside of it” enough. The result has been plenty of balls hit hard but too few that have been elevated with power.

“It’s not necessarily that I want to hit it in the air [for a fly ball],” he said. “I just want to get it off the ground.”

That’s why, for the first time in his career, Betts has begun diving deeper into the mechanics of his swing, taking renewed note of everything from body positioning to swing angles to where on the bat he is making contact with each swing.

It’s a more taxing process for him mentally. But also one he hopes can make his actual statistics look more like his expected marks.

“My whole life, I haven’t really had to think in this type of detail,” Betts said. “I’ve been able to just have an innate ability to figure it out. Figure out how to get hits. Figure out how to compete. But now, I don’t know what it is, but if I’m not perfect, if I’m not in the right position, hitting it center on the bat, I don’t really have much of a chance.”

That Betts is in this place is not a surprise. Always undersized and long saddled with below-average bat speed, the 13-year veteran has only seen his margin for error narrow as he has gotten older. This year’s oblique injury, and the toll of last year’s transition to being a full-time shortstop (where, granted, he continues to stand out defensively, last week’s error to snap Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s perfect-game bid aside) have only added to the complications.

At times, Betts has still shown his slugging prowess of old.  

Last weekend, he had five hits, including a pull-side drive for his seventh home run of the year, during a trip to Chicago against the White Sox.

However, that did not prove to be a turning point. Betts went just 2-for-11 in this week’s series sweep of the Rays, watching several more hard-hit balls — Tuesday night’s lineout chief among them — turn into frustrating outs.

“I think the word I would say, if I had to sum it up, is he’s been searching,” manager Dave Roberts said. “I think all year he’s been searching, and nothing has stuck.” 

Betts is hopeful he has found some answers lately. He said Wednesday he has made some recent mechanical adjustments to simplify his swing. He believes he has done better at “attacking” the ball and hitting it with a preferred launch angle.

“It’s just more off the ground,” he said. “Ground balls are outs in the big leagues.”

Still, the outs continue to pile up. The batting average remains the worst of his career.

The longer it goes on, the less it will feel like just luck.

“[The analytics] could predict that this ball I just hit has a .400 average, but it’s still a lineout,” he said. “So sure, those are great [from a contact standpoint]. You probably analyze players that way. But I’m trying to win the game.”

And for the Dodgers to keep winning games at the MLB-best pace they are right now, they’ll eventually need Betts’ actual numbers to catch up with his expected metrics.