In his last at-bat of the Marlins series Wednesday, Freddie Freeman took a fastball from left-hander Mike Dunn right down the middle, turned and walked back to the dugout after striking out.
In his last at-bat of the Reds series on Sunday, Freeman turned on a fastball from left-hander Manny Parra and waited for his teammates to rush out from the dugout to swarm him.
Talk about your four-day turnaround. But for a hitter like Freeman, stroking a walk-off single to beat the Reds Sunday was just getting back to normal.
“You feel more confident in yourself when you can actually see the ball,” Freeman said.
Freeman is the caliber of hitter where when he’s scuffling, there’s usually a physical reason why. And he spent three days going hitless in the Marlins series while battling dryness and abrasions in the whites of his eyes from windy conditions the series before in New York.
For just a moment there, Freeman feared he was going back to what he faced in 2012 when he battled eye problems for much of the season.
“When you have something going wrong, you get in your own head about it,” said Freeman, who had a contact break in his left eye before Monday’s game to compound the problems. “You can make it a lot worse, and I think I was doing that just a little bit. Because I had the 2012 situation, I was like ‘Oh no, here we go again.’”
Freeman benefitted from an off day Thursday, when he could continue to treat his eyes with steroid drops and a gel he used overnight.
Freeman wears glasses when he’s away from the field, but when he gets to the ballpark he puts contact lenses in – better for peripheral vision at the plate. The moment of truth comes on the first couple of blinks after he puts his contacts in each afternoon. If it’s a good day, he can blink three times and not feel like he’s wearing contacts at all.
“In the Miami series, it just felt like I was blinking on rocks,” Freeman said. “I put them on Friday, I blink, blink, blinked and it was like ‘Ah, it doesn’t hurt yet. It’s not burning. It doesn’t feel like there’s a crumpled up piece of paper in my eye.’ It was almost like a peace of mind thing just to get it out of my head. I was able to go out there and perform.”
After going 0-for-12 with six strikeouts against the Marlins, Freeman went 5-for-13 (.385) with a home run, three RBIs and only three strikeouts against the Reds. He drove in the go-ahead runs both Saturday (two-run homer) and Sunday (walk-off single) of the series sweep.
As unsettling as it was for Braves fans to see him struggling in big spots early in the week, fans were back chanting “Fred-die, Fred-die” Sunday as Freeman came to the plate with two runners on in the bottom of the 10th.
“You live for those kind of moments,” said Freeman, who got his first walk-off hit since last June 17 when his two-run homer beat the Mets. “That’s why you want to be a major league player. You hear the crowd chanting your name and you want to come through, so it was a pretty cool moment.”
Shortly thereafter, Freeman and the Braves packed up and headed for Miami. There he’ll get not only heat, humidity and a closed roof stadium, which are better for his eyes, but another shot at the Marlins.
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