A sore arm makes it difficult to throw a baseball. A sore leg makes it difficult to kick a football. An ankle that balloons to the size of some mutant melon makes it unlikely that a basketball player is going to drive past a defender.
But I have this theory about an athlete who plays through injuries: Nothing is worse than half-blindness. It’s hard to imagine anything in pro sports more difficult than a baseball player trying to hit a 95-mph fastball with blurred vision and scratched corneas, even if the ball came equipped with a sound beacon.
Which brings me to Freddie Freeman: Suddenly, he is great, and there’s a very good reason: He can see!
It’s as if Freeman just left a Benny Hinn revival and immediately delivered a bases-clearing double.
Freeman hit a game-winning, two-run homer in the ninth inning against the New York Mets at 1:22 a.m. Tuesday (a game that began, ridiculously, after a near-four-hour delay). It was the third consecutive game in which he provided the game-winning RBI (giving him a team-leading eight). It also brought his batting average to .369 in the past 31 games and .456 for the season with runners in scoring position (third best in the majors).
Freeman entered Tuesday’s second game of a doubleheader against the Mets leading the Braves in batting average (.323) and RBIs (48) and second in on-base percentage (.381) and slugging percentage (.482).
This Braves’ season taking shape as all-or-nothing. They homer, they win. They don’t, they lose. After getting swept by the Mets (4-3 and 6-1) the Braves are 38-9 when they homer and 4-21 when they don’t.
Freeman is the closest thing they have to a steady heartbeat. Hitting coach Greg Walker summarized him best: “I talk to him less, by far, than any player I’ve ever been around about mechanical issues, just because he does things so efficiently.”
It helps that the view has been upgraded to HD from rabbit ears.
“I’ve been injured,” Jason Heyward said. “But the eyes are a completely different thing. I mean, not being able to see is a whole ’nother ballgame.”
Yes. I believe they call that ballgame, “Pin the tail on the donkey.”
Freeman was named Player of the Week twice in the first five weeks of the season last season. In two seasons, he quickly evolved into a franchise centerpiece, as many had projected. (He shared the Sports Illustrated cover with Heyward in the spring of 2011, adjacent to a headline, “Boys of Spring. Only 21, Freddie Freeman and Jason Heyward are the cornerstones of Atlanta’s Brave New World.”)
But during a May 2012 trip to Colorado, Freeman started to encounter some blurred vision, which led to a seeming blur of problems.
“I’ve been wearing contacts since I was 13,” the Braves’ first baseman said Tuesday between games against the Mets. “Then last year in Colorado things went south. I have no idea why it started. We were in Colorado, and that’s when my eyes started going blurry. The next thing you know I’m having dry eyes, abrasions, things in my eyes, cuts and scratches on my cornea. I don’t know what happened. Maybe it was because I was changing contacts in and out.”
And then this: “When you can’t see, that’s kind of a big deal.”
Contacts, goggles, fluids. There was a string of failed remedies. But despite the frustrations, it’s a testament to Freeman’s talent and discipline that he hit two more homers (23) and drove in 18 more runs (94), despite the ailments and having 31 fewer at-bats. His average dropped from .282 to .259.
Freeman also played the final four months of the season with an injured left index finger, after getting hit by a relay throw while sliding into second. That prevented him from being able to grip the bat with pain.
But outside of struggling to hold the bat and struggling to see the ball, Freeman was, you know, fine.
The Mets clearly had no desire to deal with Freeman after his series-opening heroics. They walked him four times in the doubleheader.
After the 2-1 win Monday/Tuesday, Braves pitcher Tim Hudson said of Freeman: “He’s awesome, man. Just like a Little Leaguer out there, the way he’s playing. He’s like the Little Leaguer that shaves already. He’s Kelly from Bad News Bears, riding up on his motorcycle and smoking heaters. That’s Freddie right now.”
It’s Season 3. Freeman just hopes his injury problems are behind him. There also were knee and wrist injuries along the way.
“It was just a grind last year,” he said. “I never knew how I was going to feel the next day. I didn’t know how my eyes were going to be.”
Seeing: It’s kind of a big deal.
