PHOENIX — It was the night the Dodgers were coldest offensively this year that Freddie Freeman’s swing first started to get hot.
On April 25, when Paul Skenes and the Pittsburgh Pirates mowed through the Dodgers in a 3-0 shutout at Dodger Stadium, the veteran first baseman remembers something clicking in a sixth-inning at-bat, when he dumped a down-and-away splitter into center field for a base hit.
At the time, Freeman’s swing didn’t look like much, a seemingly nondescript single on a night the Dodgers generated little else against the reigning National League Rookie of the Year. As Freeman pulled into first, there was no sign he’d just experienced some sort of long-awaited breakthrough, with the 35-year-old slugger still grinding through a slow and injury-hampered start to his season.
Sixteen games later, however, that’s what Freeman now cites as the origin point for one of the most productive stretches of his entire career — the moment when, after more than a year of sensing his mechanics at the plate were slightly off, his simple swing finally felt once again on-line and in-sync.
“It was a changeup away, and I was able to stay through it and hit a line drive up the middle,” Freeman recalled. “That’s when I kind of figured things were working … That’s when my confidence in my swing kind of skyrocketed, was after that hit.”
In hindsight, the demarcation line couldn’t have been more clear.
Entering that game against the Pirates, Freeman was batting just .250 this year, with a .911 OPS inflated mostly by a flurry of early home runs.
Since then, he has gone on a tear that, even by his former MVP and eight-time All-Star standards, stands out statistically: Over his last 61 at-bats, he is batting .475 (29 hits) with six doubles, one triple, five home runs, 22 RBIs and a 1.374 OPS.
In all of Major League Baseball, no one this side of Aaron Judge has been so good.
“I just think he’s relentless,” manager Dave Roberts said of Freeman on Sunday, after his four-for-four performance in Arizona raised his season batting average to .376 and OPS to 1.170 — marks that both rank second in the majors (among hitters with 100 at-bats) behind only the New York Yankees star.
With a look of amazement, Roberts added: “I can’t remember him being this good, for this long.”
To many others around the Dodgers, Freeman’s early surge has come as a pleasant surprise. They know the sprained right ankle he played through in last year’s playoffs is still giving him problems, even after he had a debridement surgery on it this winter. They know the week he spent on the injured list in early April, when he re-aggravated his ankle after slipping in the shower, got him nowhere near back to 100% health.
Every day, Freeman said he gets “about an hour and a half” of pregame treatment on his ankle. In games, he tapes it up for stability and wears heel lifts in his cleats to prevent it from getting jammed as he runs.
Freeman has assured the team he still feels “good enough” to maintain an everyday playing schedule. This past road trip, he started in each of the Dodgers’ 10 consecutive games despite some brief conversation about finding him a day off.
“He’s been ailing,” Roberts said. “But he’s moving really well. And he’s doing a really nice job of sort of playing with a governor, managing it, knowing when to pick his spots, manage his work, all that.”
Perhaps by the All-Star break, Freeman has been told by the team’s training staff, his ankle will be back to relative normal — or, at least, to the point where “I might not have to do as much treatment,” he said.
“I’m looking forward to that,” he added with a laugh.
In the meantime, however, more of Freeman’s focus has been on building off his mechanical rediscovery; trying to maintain feel for a swing that had eluded him for so long.
Since late in the 2023 season, Freeman had what he derisively refers to as a “cut swing” in the batter’s box. His hips would open early. His bat would cut across the strike zone. He struggled to stay in rhythm and squared up to the ball.
It’s a flaw Freeman has battled off-and-on for years. So much so, he developed a meticulous routine of batting-cage drills to call upon every time the issue arose.
But last year, nothing Freeman tried seemed to remedy the problem. His .282 batting average and .854 OPS, while still good enough to make him an All-Star, were his lowest since the 2015 and 2014 seasons, respectively. And despite his October heroics, he came into 2025 still seeking a solution.
“There’d be spurts last year where it was good, and then it’d go away,” Freeman said. “Even at the beginning of this year, it was still a little cutty.”
That’s why, when Freeman golfed Skenes’ down-and-away splitter to center field last month, he started to feel hopeful.
“The previous two weeks, I would probably have rolled that over,” Freeman said. “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. It kind of helped my confidence.”
What exactly triggered the improvement remains a mystery, even to a generational hitter with a career .301 average.
“I don’t know what changed,” Freeman said last week. “I’ve been doing the same routine, the same thing. That’s why you can never figure this game out. You just gotta ride it out.”
But suddenly, what began as a slow opening month has transformed into one of Freeman’s hottest-ever starts.
Never before has Freeman maintained a batting average even close to his current .376 mark through the first 30 games of a season (his previous high was .336 in 2017). And only in that 2017 campaign, when he belted 11 home runs in his first 30 contests, had his OPS been better this far into the schedule.
“I looked up the other day and saw he was hitting .360, I had no idea,” Roberts joked. “Like I said, he’s just been relentless.”
Freeman’s current 16-game heater also has few personal parallels, representing just the second time in his career he has batted .475 or better over a stretch that long (he hit .477 from July 16 to Aug. 3 in 2023).
“Just seeing strikes and hitting them,” he said when asked why he’s been so hot. “I wish there was more I could give you. I do the same routine every day, try to hit strikes. And they’re just falling right now.”
After gradually eliminating his cut-swing problems over the last few weeks, Sunday’s four-hit performance felt like Freeman’s coup de grâce.
He started the day with two doubles against Diamondbacks right-hander Zac Gallen: the first on an outer-edge fastball he blasted the other way, the second on an inner-half cutter he pulled down the right-field line. In the seventh, he recorded his ninth home run and 33rd RBI of the season, barreling a curveball from left-handed reliever Joe Mantiply into the Chase Field pool in right-center field. In the ninth, he added a superfluous single against another left-handed reliever, Jose Castillo, knocking his down-and-away slider through the right side of the infield.
It was four hits, on four different pitch types, to four different areas of the field.
And the only time he didn’t reach base, Freeman still lifted a fifth-inning sacrifice fly 356 feet to straightaway center.
“I do feel that he’s seeing the baseball well, swinging at strikes like he does,” Roberts said. “And I think he really understands how his body’s moving right now, with regards to his swing.”
These are all things Freeman struggled to do repeatedly before his single against Skenes almost three weeks ago.
But ever since, such results have been coming seemingly on demand, even despite the continued limitations of his ankle.
“He’s already got a simple swing, simple approach,” Roberts said, trying to identify the roots of Freeman’s recent dominance. “But this might be something where, because of the right ankle, he is being more mindful and not trying to overswing or do too much — maybe.”
The one thing the manager knows for sure about his superstar first baseman right now:
“It’s been a while [since] I’ve seen him this consistent.”
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