Freddie Freeman’s season turned on a lot more than one swing, but that swing sure mattered.
After a second half that never really got rolling, the Dodgers first baseman has suddenly found some pop again in October, and it comes after a regular season defined by a long power drought and a nagging knee issue that dragged his production down.
Freeman’s final home run before the break came July 4 against the San Diego Padres. He went into the second half with 15 homers and a .290/.375/.487 slash line, still hitting for his usual average and on-base impact.
The contact stayed there too - he hit .338 over his first 39 games after the break - but the extra-base damage mostly vanished. Over that stretch, he had just nine extra-base hits, and every one of them was a double.
Then came the stretch that really told the story. Freeman snapped a 47-game homer drought with a three-run shot against left-hander Brycen Mautz of the St.
Louis Cardinals on Sept. 2, but the overall line remained rough. In the final 18 games with him in the lineup, the Dodgers went 13-5, while Freeman finished with a .167/.208/.167 slash and no extra-base hits.
The issue behind the slide was patellar tendonitis in his right knee. Freeman said the problem affected both his defense and his swing, and it got to the point where he couldn’t play the way he wanted to.
“I was having trouble moving [on defense]. I didn’t have a front side anymore [in my swing],” Freeman said of the way the injury had initially impacted him. “It just got to the point where it wasn’t giving me the best opportunity to play like I want to.”
He also said the knee trouble wasn’t tied to the stumble into the visitor’s dugout against the Kansas City Royals on Aug. 12.
The Dodgers’ first-round bye gave Freeman, Shohei Ohtani and others a week to reset after lingering issues had hurt their second-half production. For Freeman, the fix was mechanical, not medical. He said he and the staff went back through video during the first couple days of the bye and found that his shoulders were getting too closed up in his setup.
“The first couple days of the bye week, you’re just trying to figure out when looking at video what’s worked in the past, what it looks like in set-up, and we found something where my shoulders were a little too turned. All I really did was just open my shoulders a couple inches. Baseball is a game of inches.”
That adjustment has already shown up in the postseason. Freeman homered off Grant Holmes on Sunday, then went deep again on Tuesday against Chris Sale, the only pitcher to throw a complete-game shutout against the Dodgers in the regular season. Kiké Hernández started the scoring with a two-run homer in the fourth, and Freeman followed with his second blast in as many games, matching his postseason home run total from last year’s title run.
Freeman has seen this kind of late-season dip and rebound before. Two years ago, he played through a sprained ankle in the Dodgers’ final regular season series, then saw his numbers crater in the first two postseason rounds before breaking out with four home runs in a five-game World Series that earned him MVP honors.
Now the Dodgers head to the next round with Freeman back in the middle of things, and they’ll do it in the same stadium where he spent the final five seasons of his Braves career. The next challenge is right-hander Tyler Mahle, with Los Angeles trying to reach its third straight NLCS.
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