Death, Taxes, and Freddie Freeman Being Awesome

The world has changed in a lot of ways over the last dozen years, some good, and some… not. One thing that doesn’t change, however, is the status of Freddie Freeman at or near the top of the first base dogpile.

If at any point over the last decade you made a list of baseball’s top first basemen and didn’t include Freeman, you hopefully crumpled your list and started over again. Freeman will celebrate the 15th anniversary of his 2010 major league debut with the Braves later this year, and more than 2,000 hits and 350 homers later, he’s likely just rounding out the text on his bronze Hall of Fame plaque.

Back in 2014 and 2015, the Braves made the decision to do a full rebuild, the most significant teardown of their roster since the late 1980s. Brian McCann, Andrelton Simmons, B.J. and Justin Upton, Jason Heyward, and Dan Uggla were out, but when it came to their star first baseman, they took the opposite approach. Atlanta doubled down on Freeman, extending him on an eight-year, $135 million contract that secured his services until after the 2021 season. Here’s what the ZiPS projection had for him at the time:

Suffice it to say, the investment in Freeman was a wise one. ZiPS thought the contract was reasonable at the time, projecting him for 26.4 WAR for the length of the extension, and the algorithm would have offered him a deal worth $154 million. He was even better than that, amassing 35.4 over the next eight seasons. Freeman was none the worse for wear by the time the Braves were good again, and he remained the centerpiece of the offense, hitting .306/.398/.532, for a wRC+ of 142 and 16.7 WAR from 2018 through 2021, a stretch that included an MVP award in the shortened 2020 season and a World Series title in the final year.

Negotiations with Freeman on another extension didn’t pan out as anyone expected. Four days after the lockout ended, with Freeman still a free agent, the Braves traded for Matt Olson and signed him to an eight-year, $168 million extension. At the time, I thought it looked like a reasonable deal. After all, Olson was coming off a monster season of his own in 2021, and was 4 1/2 years younger than Freeman, who signed with the Dodgers later that week. Here’s how the two players have performed so far with their new teams:

From the results, you’d think Olson was the one entering his mid-30s, not Freeman. Olson has hit more homers, but in most other ways, Freeman has remained the superior first baseman.

However, we’re not here to adjudicate past debates over which first baseman Atlanta should’ve picked, but to marvel at Freeman’s agelessness. In 2025, he’s off to a blazing hot start, hitting .366/.431/.714 over the first quarter of the season, for a Judgeian wRC+ of 210. If he doesn’t make his ninth All-Star team this July, I’m in favor of a full congressional investigation. Freeman hasn’t had quite the dizzying highs of two other contemporary Hall of Fame-bound first basemen, Albert Pujols and Miguel Cabrera, but his skill set has been far more enduring than theirs. By 35, Pujols was just hanging on as a middling first baseman, and Cabrera’s last year as a decent starter came at age 33. Yet Freeman remains exactly who he’s always been: a solid first baseman with power just below the elites, excellent plate discipline, and the ability to line a gapper as easily as he crushes a homer. He also maintains a high batting average in an environment where few else can.

Among players FanGraphs categorizes as first basemen, Freeman was just out of the top 20 in career WAR through his age-31 season, his last with Atlanta. But in only three-plus seasons since then, he’s already been one of the better first basemen ever from age 32 onward.

This group of top first basemen through their age-31 seasons averaged an additional 17.8 WAR for the rest of their careers. Freeman currently ranks ninth among this group in WAR Age 32+, and if the ZiPS rest-of-season projection is correct, he’ll climb to sixth by the end of this season. This seems an opportune moment to project the rest of Freeman’s career, based on data through Tuesday’s games.

If Freeman were to reach 80.9 WAR, that would be enough to rank him sixth among first basemen for his career, and one of the five ahead of him is Stan Musial, whom JAWS classifies as a right fielder. ZiPS now projects Freeman with a 61% chance of eclipsing 3,000 hits, the best odds of any active player, and a 36% probability of hitting 500 homers. By JAWS, ZiPS would put him in a dead heat with the current sixth-place first baseman, Jeff Bagwell. The question really shouldn’t be whether or not Freeman is a future Hall of Famer, but whether he’d pass the proverbial bus test right now. For me, he does. Also, why is our standard imagined demise for mid-career Hall of Famers a fatal run-in with mass transit?

Time always ends up the winner in the end. But Freeman is currently fighting time to a draw for longer than most greats.