Folding your grandmother’s chaise lounge on a breezy day at the beach. Closing an umbrella in the teeth of a windstorm. Madly checking all your pockets when you’ve misplaced your keys. The swing of Los Angeles Dodgers first baseman Freddie Freeman has no comparison among major league hitters, so you are left to find endeavors in everyday life with such mechanical quirks.
The Freeman swing is no oil painting, unless you had a Jackson Pollock in mind. Freeman starts with his bat off the shoulder and parallel to the ground. His back elbow is raised. As the pitcher winds up, Freeman snaps the bat to attention, upright, as if a predator put on alert by the sudden scent of prey. Then he pulls his hands close to his body and throws the barrel at the ball with what looks like a flick of the wrists. He finishes with two hands high, the wrists having completely turned over, in the manner of someone who has striped a 300-yard drive down the center of the fairway.
This is the swing that has launched 2,329 hits, postseason included, including the one that salted away World Series Game 3 on Monday, a spoiler alert though it came just three batters into the game. Freeman ripped a two-run homer off a shaky Clarke Schmidt to send the Los Angeles Dodgers on their way to a 4–2 victory over the New York Yankees in a game that wasn’t nearly as close as the final score indicated. The Dodgers and Freeman, the presumptive MVP, are one win away from ending the World Series in a rout.
Freeman is on one of the greatest hitting heaters the World Series has ever seen. So hobbled by a sprained ankle a week ago that he did not play in the Dodgers’ NLCS clincher, Freeman joined Hank Bauer (1958) and Barry Bonds (2002) as the only players to homer in the first three games of a World Series. Amazingly, Freeman hit his three World Series homers in a span of just 10 swings.
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Including the 2021 World Series playing for the Braves, Freeman has homered in five straight series games, tying George Springer for the World Series record.
“There are points throughout the course of the season when the swing is actually good,” Freeman said, “but it felt like it was a constant battle all season long with my swing. It kind of happens like that. It seems hard: hit a round ball with a round bat. There’s a lot of different ways to do it. I’m thankful that it’s in a good spot right now when we need it the most. I’m just seeing the ball very well. You know, I'm swinging at the strikes, taking the balls … what you're trying to do every game. And thankfully I've been able to do it.”
Freeman has had a Hall of Fame career. He is one of only 33 players who have played 2,000 games with an OPS+ of at least 142. Thirty of those players have been on a Hall of Fame ballot and all of them have been voted in except for PED-tainted sluggers Manny Ramirez and Bonds. This World Series is burnishing Freeman’s reputation as one of his generation’s greatest pure hitters. This is his magnum opus. His career postseason OPS is .890, 17th all-time (min. 200 plate appearances) and just ahead of Reggie Jackson.
Those are the numbers. How Freeman gets it done, line drive after line drive, year after year, is worthy not just of admiration but peer review.
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About eight miles south of Yankee Stadium, on the fourth floor of the Museum of Modern Art, hangs an Abstract Impressionism painting by Jackson Pollock titled . Pollock created it by flinging and pouring ropes of paint across a huge canvas stretched over the floor. You can stand back from it and, though there is no discernible pattern or point of focus, see what you will. Order, chance, chaos, rhythm, nature … all of it or some of it. It’s what great art does: It stimulates the mind.
With Pollock’s work in mind, I asked the Dodgers to stand back and look at , otherwise known as the Freeman Swing, and tell me what they see.
Walker Buehler: “The swing isn’t fun for me facing him. I felt like he was on time all the time for everything that I threw. And you look at the simplicity of his approach and his setup and it makes a lot of sense why you can hit any pitch anywhere.
“He hit a homer off me in the ‘20 playoffs that I think there’s very few people in the world that can hit the pitch that I threw in for a homer. And it was the hardest ball he's ever hit in the big leagues.
“It was a heater up in. I think he hit it about 118 [mph]. Mookie almost jumped for it. He's a special player, and somehow gets a little bit lost between Mookie and Shohei. You got two elite players and we have a third one who happens to be one of the top 20 baseball players in the world that we don’t talk a ton about. He certainly showed up in the past three games.”
Tommy Edman: “He's probably one of the most consistent hitters I’ve ever seen. I remember, I think it was two years ago when I was with St. Louis, we had a four-game series, and he got out once the whole series. He went like 14-for-15 or something like that. I was like, ‘This guy is the best hitter in baseball right now.’ And obviously it's clicking right now in the World Series on the biggest stage. It's been fun to watch.
“He does such a good job of keeping his hands inside the ball better than just about anybody. And you go out there and watch his batting practice and he just is hitting everything the other way, low line drives and, not trying to hit bombs and drive the ball out of the ballpark, even though he's done that in the first three games of this World Series.
“But I think it's probably a good lesson to a lot of young players out there is that you don't necessarily need to hit homers in batting practice in order to hit homers in the game.”
Jack Flaherty: “His swing works for him. Everybody's swing is different. That's all that matters. It's much more fun watching him on this side than just trying to get him out. He's one of those guys you look at the numbers and it's like, ‘I don't know, let's hope he hits at someone,’ because he's tough to punch out and it’s tough to get him to chase.”
Teoscar Hernández: “It just hard to describe because that's … that's how Freddie is. Freddie is not a guy that swings and misses a lot. He’s always putting the ball in play. It was a matter of time that he got his swing back. His health is a huge factor. And he's showing it. It was huge for us that he’s feeling better.”
Gavin Lux: “He’s one of the game’s best hitters. He’s going to be a first ballot Hall of Famer for a reason. It’s fun to watch him compete and take at-bats because he just doesn’t give anything away.
“Oh, man, I saw a video of his swing from high school and it hasn’t changed a bit. He’s got a really good bat path. He doesn’t swing and miss much. He doesn’t chase. He’s old school. He takes the ball the other way and he’s stubborn as hell. He’s not going to change. It’s fun to watch him do the same thing every day. He’s the ultimate consistency guy.”
Miguel Rojas: “You watch him work and it’s the same every day. Every swing he wants to hit the ball softly to shortstop starting out and then eventually line drives over the shortstop’s head. He never, ever changes. And what’s so special about him are his hands. His hands are amazing.”
Having canvassed enough patrons, I figured it was time to hear from the artist himself. Freeman on Freeman.
I told Freeman about my conversation the other day with Kirk Gibson, his brother in Dodgers walk-off World Series home runs. Gibson had told me he always admired Freeman, but never could come up with a similar comp to how Freeman swings the bat. I asked Freeman to describe the uniqueness of his swing.
“I don't know,” Freeman said. “I slow it down [on tape] and it looks weird. But, I just … I’ve always just tried to be short to it and inside the baseball. And I played a lot of golf as a kid, and I think that’s why I follow through like I do.
“But I don’t have a way to explain it. It works and I don't really want to figure it out. Because when you try and figure something out, then it may be gone. You have got to let that thing ride.”
A week ago, Freeman was hitting on one good leg. Because of a badly sprained right ankle, he could not get weight to his front side. The best he could do was flick those wrists without support from his lower half. During the four days between the NLCS and World Series, he did not run at all, staying away from the activity that most aggravated his ankle. In a hitting session last Tuesday with Dodgers coach Robert Van Scoyoc, he developed a key mental cue. Freeman always has taken his stride with his front foot landing closer to the plate than his back foot. But to compensate for his weak ankle, he thought about stepping outward, with the front foot farther. He wasn’t actually stepping that far away, but the mental cue of doing so allowed him to stay on his back side longer. Immediately his practice liners over the shortstop’s head returned in familiar cadence. His ankle felt better and better.
Freeman burned Nestor Cortes in Game 1 and Carlos Rodón in Game 2. He had never faced Schmidt before Game 3. Freeman fell behind, 1-and-2 without taking a swing.
“Well, thankfully he threw all three pitches in those three pitches,” Freeman said. “So he went slider on the first pitch, and then he went cutter up, and then he threw the knuckle curve. So, I saw all three pitches. And you know, I was okay with being down two strikes because I got to see everything he had.”
Schmidt tried to throw a back door cutter. He missed on the other side of the plate, toward Freeman’s hands. Freeman crushed it into the right field seats.
“It changes the whole game,” said Buehler, who had a 2–0 lead before he threw a pitch. “The whole complexion of the game, not just for me for sure but for our team for sure. I think if you look at the numbers in terms of playoff baseball, whoever scores first … I talked kind of about grabbing momentum or keeping momentum and how important that is for playoff baseball. And there's not anything much bigger you can do on the road than hit a big home run for us.”
Like Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays in 1962, when the two best players in baseball went 10-for-53 (.189) in the World Series without an RBI, Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge are 2-for-23 (.087) without an RBI. Instead, in a galaxy of stars, it is the old soul with the old school approach and the Abstract Impressionism swing that has owned the World Series.
“Technique,” Pollock once said, “is just a means of arriving at a statement … It doesn’t matter how the paint is put on, as long as something is said.”
Seventy-four years after Pollock painted , the work still makes a statement. In the same way, 74 years on, people will recall the 2024 World Series for the statement Freeman made, if not how he did it.