PHOENIX — His ankle is still not right. He does not run, he shuffles. Each of his frequent trips around the bases adds a tax to how long it’ll be until Freddie Freeman’s surgically-repaired right ankle feels like it should. Each day, the Los Angeles Dodgers’ training staff starts with triage and looks to get Freeman’s ankle back in the right place.
“I’m not 100 percent,” Freeman said, “but I feel good. I feel good enough.”
His swing has been more than good enough. The 35-year-old first baseman lumbers around the bases so often because he just hasn’t stopped hitting, running a 14-game hitting streak through much of the Dodgers’ 10-game, three-city trip. When that streak ended Saturday, he responded with a four-hit game Sunday against the Arizona Diamondbacks, smacking a pair of doubles and splashing a home run into the Chase Field pool.
Dodgers manager Dave Roberts has had a front-row seat for Freeman’s consistent excellence over the last three seasons, yet was startled by what he saw on the scoreboard recently.
“I looked up the other day and saw he was hitting .360. I had no idea,” Roberts said. “But when you look into it, he’s just been relentless.”
Freddie splash! pic.twitter.com/mruXGYjK7E
— Los Angeles Dodgers (@Dodgers) May 11, 2025
Freeman is hitting .376 as the Dodgers open a three-game home series against the A’s on Tuesday. His OPS is up to 1.171, and his wRC+ is 115 percent better than league average. New York Yankees star Aaron Judge is the only hitter in the sport who has been better in each of those three metrics — and he wasn’t the one of the two limping around last year’s World Series.
The Dodgers have seen Freeman at his best. They haven’t seen this.
“I can’t remember him being this good for this long,” Roberts said.
It’s been years since Freeman felt this good at the plate. The 2020 MVP grumbled much of last season about the state of his swing. As the injuries and stresses of his most trying year piled up, Freeman’s frustration mounted. He felt like he could not help but “cut” his swing, opening his hips up too early and minimizing how long his barrel would drive through the strike zone.
He was missing pitches he’d normally hit. He couldn’t pepper line drives the other way the way he craves. Never in his decade-plus as the game’s most consistent hitter had he tweaked his routine, but he stewed when the swing didn’t correct itself. In addition to missing time, his .854 OPS was his lowest since he had a .841 OPS as a 25-year-old in 2015. The struggles dated to the end of the 2023 season, when Freeman and Mookie Betts combined to log one total hit in getting swept out of the postseason.
In the wake of Freeman’s star turn last October, the reigning World Series MVP has cemented his place in Dodgers lore forever. But he was still trying to solidify where his swing was for the first few weeks of this season.
The lingering effects of injuries he played through last postseason didn’t help. A recurrence of rib discomfort (Freeman tore cartilage early in the postseason run) kept him out of both of the Dodgers’ regular-season games in Tokyo to start the year. He took a spill in the bathtub, which aggravated his ankle and sent him to the injured list for the first time since 2017.
It took facing the league’s best for Freeman’s swing to find its current rhythm. There was no light bulb that went off. No mechanical tweak. He went into a matchup against Pittsburgh Pirates star Paul Skenes on April 25 having collected just nine hits in 36 at-bats since coming off the injured list. Freeman struck out in his first at-bat before hooking a curveball into shallow right field for a double.
The next at-bat showed Freeman what he wanted to see. He hung back on a Skenes splitter down and off the plate. Rather than fly open too early, he connected and lofted a soft single to center field.
“That’s when I kind of figured things were working, up through the middle, because the previous two weeks I would probably have rolled that over,” Freeman said. “That’s when my confidence in my swing kind of skyrocketed, was after that hit.
“Sometimes you just need a result. It’s not about hitting the ball hard sometimes. It could be a bloop. It could be how you’re feeling. But that pitch in that location and how I hit it off Paul in that at-bat, I felt like I was in a good spot and kind of helped my confidence.”
Since that day, Freeman is 27-for-57, hitting .474 with a 1.382 OPS.
“I wish there was more I could give you,” Freeman said when asked to explain the breakthrough. “I do the same routine every day, try to hit strikes, and they’re just falling right now.”
He’s done so while acclimating to what Roberts has called a “new normal” with his ankle, which Freeman rolled and suffered torn ligaments in back in September. It took until November for Freeman to go under the knife for a debridement procedure when his ankle continued to swell; testing beforehand showed a bone spur that was dangerously close to Freeman’s Achilles tendon.
Now, each day, the Dodgers begin the process of putting Freeman back together again with an hour and a half of treatment before he sets foot on the field to start his routine. After the game, he undergoes a series of contrasting temperatures (hot to cold and back) and sometimes a boot to preserve the state of the ankle. He wears a heavy wrap under his pants and lifts in his cleats to prevent his ankle from jamming against the top of the shoe.
The ankle has hardly gotten a break. Asked directly if he feels the ankle will be 100 percent again, Freeman admitted he doesn’t know.
“(Head athletic trainer Thomas Albert) thinks in a couple of months, maybe after the All-Star break, I might not have to do as much treatment,” Freeman said. “I’m looking forward to that.”
As long as he continues to produce like this, the extra time in the training room is probably worth it.
“Kind of been looking for this swing for a long time, and finally found it,” Freeman said last week.
(Photo: Christian Petersen / Getty Images)
