SAN DIEGO — Mookie Betts is feeling himself right now, and everything for him offensively is flowing from there. Like a sharpshooter, he feels like he’s in the midst of a heater.“It’s like Steph (Curry),” Betts said at his locker Sunday morning, fresh off his third consecutive game with a home run in his resurgent June. “You just need to see a ball go through the rim.”Betts is making his splash at the plate again. He entered Sunday back above water, hitting for a league-average 100 wRC+ after a miserable start offensively. He is looking like the hitter the Los Angeles Dodgers have come to know, with all three home runs during this torrid stretch coming on the kind of pull-side power that made him a star. He entered Sunday having homered in five of his last 13 games.Then he lined a two-run single in the fifth inning to break open a 4-2 Dodgers win over the San Diego Padres as part of a two-hit day.Why MLB's draft proposal would be bad for baseball's futureKeith LawMore than anything, Betts believes in what he’s doing again. He entered Sunday feeling unlucky for most of 2026, with the largest gap in baseball between his expected batting average (.282) and actual batting average (.230), according to Baseball Savant. The methods he’s always used to troubleshoot his swing weren’t working. Betts blossomed as an MVP in 2018 with the Boston Red Sox because he found mental cues that maximized his frame and elite hands to generate power and spray line drives. Each at-bat, he thought through something he had to do, which locked everything into place.Now, there’s no cue. He’s not thinking about anything when he steps into the batter’s box these days.“Just hit it,” Betts told The Athletic. “Just see the ball, and hit it.”Some of this is survival. What he’s tried in the past has not worked. He has sorted through enough in his swing. There’s a security in feeling that his pregame swing work will translate into the game, rather than trying to make fixes in the middle of it.It’s also just too hard these days to think about anything other than just trying to compete against the guy on the mound, Betts said.“Now, guys, you gotta cover five pitches,” Betts said. “Every pitcher, you got to cover five, six pitches. It’s hard, dude. Hitting is just so hard now.“Back in 2018, the guys weren’t throwing the five pitches. It’s easy for me to have a cue that kind of worked, because I didn’t have to cover so much. Now, I mean, it’s just really, really hard. So the less things I can think about, you want to focus on the ball.”Betts said he wishes he could’ve always been this way. There’s a freedom that comes with not thinking about your mechanics, even if those mechanics reshaped you as a hitter.“Things change,” Betts said.He’s 33 years old now, coming off the worst offensive season of his career and trying to avoid another.His elite glove at shortstop has given Betts cushion; he can still be one of the most valuable players in the sport when playing a premium position if he can produce at even a slightly above league-average rate. It took this heater just to get Betts back to where he is now. But there’s been enough in this hot streak to provide encouragement he could be back for good.