Freeman finally plays in his ‘home’ park
Freddie Freeman didn’t get a suite this time. Until the Dodgers first baseman took the field at Angel Stadium on Friday night, he didn’t want to jinx it.
“I’ve had multiple opportunities to play in Angel Stadium,” the former Orange El Modena High star said this week. “And I have not been able to.”
Friday marked Freeman’s first game in Anaheim — the stadium where he grew up attending games — since May 2011, when he was a 21-year-old rookie with the Atlanta Braves.
In 2017, Freeman secured an entire suite for his family members ahead of the Braves’ first trip to Anaheim in six years — only to break his wrist two weeks before the series and sit out all three games.
This spring, after signing with the Dodgers, he was expecting close to a full section’s worth of family members to come to the exhibition game in Anaheim — only to get sick the day before and have to sit it out.
So as he planned this weekend’s two-game series against the Angels, he opted to play it safe.
“I decided not to go the suite route this time,” he said with a laugh, “to see if it would get jinxed.”
It did not. Freeman, now 32, a veteran of 13 big league seasons, a five-time All-Star and the 2020 National League most valuable player, stepped into the batter’s box in the first inning Friday night and was serenaded by chants of “Fred-die!”
He smoked an RBI single to right-center for the Dodgers’ first run.
“There’s not a lot of things a veteran player hasn’t gotten to experience, but playing here in front of family, I’m surprised he hasn’t had that opportunity [since 2011],” Dodgers manager Dave
Roberts said before the game.
Roberts never considered posting a lineup without Freeman’s name as a joke.
“It wouldn’t matter — he doesn’t look at the lineup anyway,” Roberts said. “He knows he’s in there, so the joke would be on me. It wouldn’t age well.”
There was no way Roberts was going to rest baseball’s hottest hitter two days before the All-Star break. Freeman entered Friday on a torrid four-game streak in which he hit .813 (13 for 16) with two homers, four doubles and four RBIs, raising his average to .320, fourth best in baseball.
“You just try to ride it as long as you can,” Freeman said, “until it suddenly ends.”
Freeman came of age as an Angels fan at the height of the franchise’s glory years, having turned 13 when the team won the 2002 World Series. He idolized players such as Garret Anderson, Darin Erstad, David Eckstein and Tim Salmon.
His high school team played once at Angel Stadium, and Freeman said the 2011 series in Anaheim was one of his favorite big league moments — at least, before this weekend.
“That magnitude, playing in front of your family in the place that you grew up going to games, I don’t think it gets much better than that,” Freeman said. “When you get to play in the place you always went to as a kid, it’s pretty special.”
Trout out
Angels center fielder Mike Trout was not in the lineup after sitting out the previous two games because of upper back spasms, but the team is hopeful he’ll return Saturday and be able to play in Tuesday’s All-Star Game.
“He’s improving,” head athletic trainer Mike Frostad said. “We’re almost at that point where he’s ready to start a game. We just keep doing treatments on him every day and we’re getting closer and closer.”
Short hops
An MRI test on Dodgers right-hander Brusdar Graterol’s inf lamed shoulder showed no structural damage and the reliever is expected to return in two to three weeks. “He said he feels much better,” Roberts said. “It’s not as tender. His range of motion is good.” ... Dodgers left-hander Andrew Heaney (shoulder inf lammation) is scheduled to make a three-inning, 45-pitch rehabilitation start for class-A Rancho Cucamonga on Saturday . ... The Dodgers signed former Angels closer Hansel Robles, who was released by the Boston Red Sox last Saturday, to a minor league deal.