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LOS ANGELES — Freddie Freeman owns an MVP award and has been selected to five All-Star teams in a career on a Hall of Fame trajectory.
As of Thursday afternoon, the missing piece to his Braves legacy was a World Series appearance. The Braves, though, were on the brink of ending a pennant drought that dated to 1999 as they prepared to play Game 5 of the NLCS against the Dodgers.
Freeman, 31, was in the same spot last season. But the Braves, ahead 3-1 in the NLCS, were beaten in three straight games by the Dodgers to begin a long winter that morphed into a rough spring and early summer.
The Braves, injected with fresh talent before the trade deadline, awoke over the final two months to win a fourth straight NL East title. The first baseman Freeman finished with a .300/.393/.503 slash line with 31 homers and 83 RBIs, joining Austin Riley to give the Braves a formidable 1-2 punch.
“Just the way [Freeman] goes about his business to me is the definition of a professional baseball player,” Riley said. “Day in and day out he brings it, he doesn’t get too high and too low. He is just so poised in every situation. I think that is the biggest thing I have taken from him is just learning how to deal with success and failure.”
Freeman was a 10-year-old growing up in Southern California the last time the Braves played a World Series game. Those Braves included the vaunted pitching trio of Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine and John Smoltz and another Hall of Famer, Chipper Jones, at third base. The Braves were swept four games by the Yankees, who won their second of three straight World Series titles. The Braves have not won a World Series since 1995, when they beat the Indians.
“I was very young when they went, the last time they went [to the World Series],” Freeman said.
He arrived on the scene in 2010 and gradually emerged among the game’s premier players. But the Braves played in only one playoff series (plus a wild-card game loss to the Cardinals) in his first eight seasons.
“He’s been through the really rough times of this team when they weren’t really winning at all,” Riley said. “And to finally be in a position to where we can get there, I think that’s huge and if you ask every player it would mean a lot to them for us to get to the World Series for him.”
Freeman’s October contributions have included a go-ahead homer against the Brewers in the series-clinching Game 4 of the NLDS. He homered in the Braves’ victory in Game 4 of the NLCS at Dodger Stadium and entered play 5-for-16 (.313) in the series.
In assessing the season, Freeman pointed to the trades orchestrated in July by president of baseball operations Alex Anthopoulos for outfielders Eddie Rosario, Joc Pederson, Adam Duvall and Jorge Soler as the impetus to this Braves run.
“Things just kind of were going haywire and we were treading water and that’s all we needed to do until Alex went out and got us a whole new outfield,” Freeman said. “He really did. And this team has been completely different for the last two, two and a half months. We’ve been playing .630, .640 win percentage baseball. So this isn’t anything new to us. We’ve been a really good team for a really long time and so we’ve just been playing really good baseball lately.”
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