Shower ‘mishap’ sidelines Freddie Freeman; Dodgers ‘interested’ in torpedo bats
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The story, Freddie Freeman said, began with a water leak.
Freeman said there was recently a water leak in the master bathroom of his family’s Southland home that knocked his normal shower out of service. So, when the Dodgers’ first baseman was beginning his morning Sunday, during an early off day in the team’s regular-season schedule, he used one of the other bathrooms to shower.
That’s when calamity struck.
While trying to step into the dual bathtub-shower, Freeman’s right foot slipped. The 6-foot-4 slugger went crashing into the tub. And the right ankle he had surgically repaired this offseason, after playing through a severe sprain in last year’s playoffs, had been aggravated.
“Freak accident,” Freeman said with a shake of his head Tuesday. “Can’t really make it up.”
Just as Freeman was finally starting to get past the ankle and rib injuries that dogged him last October before lingering into this spring, his shower slip has knocked him out of the lineup again this week. He didn’t play on Monday in the Dodgers’ series-opener against his former team, the Atlanta Braves. He wasn’t in the starting lineup Tuesday, with only slim odds of being available off the bench.
Tyler Glasnow, pitching for the first time since sustaining an elbow injury last season, shuts down Atlanta in a 6-1 victory for the undefeated Dodgers.
The good news: Freeman said his ankle, which swelled in the wake of his accident, is already feeling better. Before the game Tuesday, he was able to go through a normal session of fielding drills and batting practice. His hope is that he will return to action either Wednesday or Friday, depending on how quickly he progresses before the team flies to Philadelphia on Thursday’s day off.
“It’s frustrating, because I was actually feeling pretty good,” said Freeman, who missed the Dodgers’ opening two games of the season in Tokyo because of discomfort in his ribs, and spent the spring carefully nursing his ankle back to full health.
“You slip in bathtub showers all the time,” he added. “When you’re healthy, you just catch yourself. And when you’re not, when you got a little surgically repaired ankle, mostly I think it just flared everything kind of back up.”
Freeman did get a clean X-ray on his ankle after Sunday’s fall. His wife, Chelsea, also drove him to the ballpark that afternoon for three hours of treatment, after which, Freeman noted, his ankle had already improved to the point that he could get back behind the wheel.
If all that wasn’t enough, Freeman said he has also been battling a cold the last week, not getting completely over it until the end of last weekend’s Tigers series — when he had a home run and RBI double in Saturday’s finale.
“Kicked the sickness,” he joked, “then kicked the bathtub.”
Luckily, he noted, it shouldn’t lead to any extended absence from the lineup.
“The plan is, if everything goes well, I’ll be back out there tomorrow,” he said. “With the day off on Thursday, they’re pushing for me to play Friday. But I’m gonna do everything I can to get out there tomorrow.”
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.
The reaction across MLB to the design of the New York Yankees’ new ‘torpedo’ bats after the Bronx Bombers belted 13 home runs in two games was swift.
“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.
The Dodgers are embarking on the path of least resistance, and that’s not what leaders do. Leaders do what is right and deal with the consequences.
“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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