Some of Freddie Freeman’s most productive moments as a Dodger have come in matchups against his old team, the Atlanta Braves.
When the Dodgers announced their lineup for Monday’s series opener against Atlanta at Dodger Stadium, however, the 35-year-old first baseman was not part of it.
Turns out, after hitting a home run and an RBI double in the Dodgers’ victory against the Detroit Tigers on Saturday, Freeman slipped while stepping into his shower at home later that night, according to manager Dave Roberts, aggravating the right ankle he badly sprained at the end of last season and had surgically repaired.
“He had a little mishap in the shower,” Roberts said. “It swelled up a little bit. Not able to play tonight.”
Freeman is considered day to day, and will be re-evaluated Tuesday.
Monday will already mark the third game Freeman has missed this season. During the team’s season-opening trip to Tokyo, he was held out of both games against the Chicago Cubs after feeling discomfort in his left ribs — in the same area he battled his other postseason injury last year, broken rib cartilage — during pregame batting practice on opening day.
While Freeman was able to return from that issue once the team returned home, his ankle had still been less than 100% even before Saturday’s shower incident. It’s part of the reason why the team decided to exercise caution with Freeman on Monday; even though the former Braves star has hit .299 with 12 RBIs in 20 games against his old team since signing with the Dodgers in 2022, and was in a “good spot” with his swing coming out of Saturday’s game, as Roberts acknowledged.
“He feels that he could go out there and play,” Roberts added. “But just the upside-downside, doing the math, just let him recoup today, and we’ll see how he is tomorrow.”
With Freeman out of the lineup, Kiké Hernández was slated to start at first base. It marked Hernández’s first game since the Tokyo Series because of a stomach illness that sidelined him for the team’s sweep of the Tigers last weekend.
Torpedoes incoming
Dodgers players and coaches were just as surprised as the rest of the baseball world upon learning of the bowling-pin-shaped “torpedo” bats that some New York Yankees players were using last weekend, when they mashed a whopping 15 home runs in a three-game sweep of the Milwaukee Brewers.
But by Monday, intrigue in the new bat design was high among the team, with several players noting they already had orders for their own torpedo bats on the way.
“I mean, it sounds interesting,” co-hitting coach Robert Van Scoyoc said. “I think guys will try it. I mean, how do you not, right? You see those kinds of outcomes, of course.”
Third baseman Max Muncy is one of the Dodgers hitters planning to experiment with the new design — in which the fattest part of the barrel is moved closer to the handle to increase contact quality on swings that before would have jammed a hitter.
He said he had some coming on an overnight shipment, and was excited to see what he hoped might be a rare “major innovation” in bat design.
“For me, it’s exciting just because there hasn’t been much of this,” Muncy said, noting that outside of the wood types and handle variations, bats have largely remained unchanged over the history of the sport.
“They had 100 different bat models [already], shaped this way, shaped that way,” he added. “But nothing’s ever been as drastic as what this is.”
Muncy nonetheless had questions about the torpedo bats, which were designed by an MIT-educated former physics professor who worked for the Yankees the past several seasons.
In his own swing, Muncy noted, he typically hits the ball closer to the end of the bat; a place where, on the torpedo design, the barrel tapers off.
“This might actually be a detriment to me,” he laughed.
Still, he noted that the mere idea of a potentially major technological breakthrough for hitters was welcome news; especially given the advancements pitchers have made over the last decade using technology and biometrics to learn to throw harder.
“If this is something that truly works, I think it’s exciting for the game of baseball, for the offensive side,” he said. “I’m just intrigued by all of it.”
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