At first glance, it might not have seemed like much of a slump.
But for Dodgers slugger Freddie Freeman, his performance through much of April certainly started to feel that way.
Freeman saw action on Monday and hit .306 with eight doubles, two home runs and 19 RBIs. He had an on-base-plus-slugging percentage of .861 and a 142 OPS+ (which essentially means he’s been 42% more productive than the average MLB hitter).
Those were declines from his first two seasons in LA, where he finished in the top five in MVP voting both times.
But a dip? Real?
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“I pride myself on being consistent,” Freeman said. “And I’m not being consistent right now.”
At least that’s what Freeman felt two weeks ago, in the midst of an eight-for-47 stretch that dropped his batting average to .259.
“I’m not hitting the pitches I normally would hit,” Freeman said at the time. “There’s a lot going on there. I’m trying to figure it out.”
There are times in every season when Freeman cools down and his precise swing mechanics get out of control. Almost always this is because his hips rotate too open and his bat cuts short and across the strike zone – not square and straight through.
The result: Freeman will stop hitting fastballs for opposite-field line drives, or rolling up breaking pitches into the right-center field gap. Instead, he’ll hit lazy pop-flies, or rip a ground ball to the pull side, or simply foul a throw he would normally hit.
“I don’t swing at bad pitches,” Freeman said at the height of his early-season struggles. “I’m just not hitting them where they need to go.”
The solution: a composite routine of breakdown-oriented pregame techniques; especially a signature “net drill” where Freeman will line up about an arm’s distance from a batting screen and then attempt to execute a swing without brushing the barrel against it, hoping to recalibrate the inside-out bat path that has long been key to his career .301 batting average.
“I usually only perform it five to 10 times a year,” Freeman said of the practice, which he has been doing since childhood. “That’s usually when things really don’t go well.”
This year, Freeman dusted it off early, one of several notable changes he’s made to his meticulous pregame process.
In recent weeks, the 34-year-old has also started taking batting practice outdoors almost daily, a rarity during his first two years with the Dodgers (he generally prefers to hit in the clubhouse batting cages).
Overall, he has tripled his total number of pregame swings, he said, “just to rush this [process] upwards.”
Lately, better results are finally starting to follow.
Freeman entered Monday on an eight-game hitting streak, hitting 12 for his last 27 with 11 RBIs and more extra-base hits (five) than strikeouts (four).
Half of those games were multi-hits. And he’s recorded all but one hit up the middle or the other side — a telltale sign of synchronized mechanics in his swing.
“Everything worked,” Freeman said. “I just did really slow, soft swings in BP, and then let the adrenaline of the game make the swing a little bit harder. Things went a lot better last week.”
It’s a welcome sight for the Dodgers, who have seen their $162 million first baseman battle infrequently since arriving in March 2022.
“He’ll figure it out,” manager Dave Roberts said this weekend. “But there is some sadness when he is in a dark place.”
Phrases like “sadness” and “dark place” may not correspond to Freeman’s actual numbers.
Even at his recent low point, when a three-game drought culminated in a three-strikeout performance on April 19, Freeman’s production was still comfortably above league average.
Even as he battled inconsistency at the plate, he still had a perpetual smile and joked with coaches and teammates.
“Sometimes players are in a dark place and they really feel it and mean it,” Roberts said. “But Freddie knows he’s a great hitter… So I think he has some levity with it.”
When asked last week if he was being superstitious about changing his hitting routine, Freeman referenced a line from Steve Carell’s character on “The Office,” Michael Scott.
“A bit naughty,” he replied.
When he was jokingly told this weekend that he had to be the worst .300 hitter in baseball, Freeman chuckled and shrugged.
“It feels like that,” he said.
Yet the reason this slump felt different, why the frustration boiled much closer to the surface, is that it followed similar problems last fall.
At the end of the 2023 regular season, Freeman was hitting just .262 over his final 17 games (a notable drop from his .339 average before that). Then, during the Dodgers’ postseason sweep of the Arizona Diamondbacks, his swing seemed completely off, resulting in a one-of-10 run that loomed large in the Dodgers’ early elimination.
“That’s why there’s so much frustration,” Freeman said earlier this month. “Because I know what I’m doing wrong. It’s an over rotation with my hips that’s causing it [other issues]. It’s the same every time. But for some reason I’ve gone through everything about twenty times and it still doesn’t click. So that’s why I’m here, going outside, doing little things differently, [trying to] smile through it.”
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Finally, in the past week it seems that the tide is starting to turn.
In addition to his eight-game hitting streak, Freeman faced a different kind of drought on Sunday, hitting his first home run since the Dodgers’ home opener exactly a month earlier.
“No,” Freeman said when asked if he was concerned about increasing his home run total after sitting at one for 26 games. “If you just go for power when you don’t have a good swing yet, it’s just never going to happen.”
But now, thanks to some troubled swing progression and confidence in his hitting, the moment offered the latest sign of Freeman’s continued turnaround; that a long-drawn-out (for him at least) slump at the start of the season finally appears to be largely over.
“There are still bad swings in there,” Freeman said, “but ultimately there have been a lot more good swings lately.”
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This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
