Freddie Freeman Is a Metronome

The calendar just flipped over to June, and somehow we have yet to write even one article about the best position player in all of baseball this season. Not that it’s a surprise; nothing about the best position player in all of baseball is a surprise.

If you Google “Freddie Freeman” and “killer,” in just the first page of results, you’ll find references to Freeman as a Nats killer, a Braves killer, a Mets killer, a Phillies killer, and a Cubs killer. (If you don’t use the quotation marks, you’ll get references to Freeman as a Mets killer and a Nats killer, plus a bunch of headlines about an actual murderer.) But here’s the thing: if you look at Freeman’s performance against every team in baseball and rank them by wOBA, only one of those five teams is even in the top 12. It feels personal no matter who you root for, but Freeman is just an everybody killer. It’s a conundrum straight out of Catch-22.

“They’re trying to kill me,” Yossarian told him calmly.
“No one’s trying to kill you,” Clevinger cried.
“Then why are they shooting at me?” Yossarian asked.
“They’re shooting at everyone,” Clevinger answered. “They’re trying to kill everyone.”
“And what difference does that make?”

(The Braves are the one team that’s actually in the top 12; they’re number four. Freeman has a .361 average and a 206 wRC+ against them, and for obvious reasons he may actually want to kill them.)

Still, Freeman is absolutely running roughshod over the rest of the league this season. The Dodgers first baseman has a 170 wRC+, third-best in all of baseball, and his 2.9 WAR is more than everyone who isn’t Zac Gallen. That’s a song we’ve heard before. Freeman had a 157 wRC+ last year. And a 135 wRC+ in 2021. And a 186 wRC+ in 2020. I have seven nieces and nephews, and the last time Freeman wasn’t at least 30% better than the average hitter, six of them hadn’t been born yet. Fun fact: the seventh was born a few months before Freeman’s first season and is now old enough to be hitting dingers of her own.

The 33-year-old Freeman has played in every Dodgers game this season and is slashing .344/.416/.589. He’s on a 20-game hit streak, and 14 of them (including four of the last five) have been multi-hit games. “Just trying to keep it simple, not overthink things, trying to take what they give me,” is the fiery quote that he gave reporters. “I’ve been getting results the last few weeks.” That’s one way to describe a literally historic run in which he set Dodgers records for both doubles and extra-base hits in a calendar month.

So what is Freeman doing differently this year? Well… nothing in particular. He’s been a bit more aggressive on the first pitch. He’s putting the ball in play a bit more, though his contact rate is down. And his average exit velocity is up even though his hard-hit rate is down. But all those stats are all well within his career norms. The only completely new thing in Freeman’s statistical profile is that he’s chasing just 27.2% of the time, which would beat his career low by a full percentage point. Take a look at these two extremely similar heat maps of his swing rate. Last year is on the left and this year is on the right:

Freeman is looking for the ball on the inside part of the plate a bit more and chasing it outside a bit less. And that’s about it. Can you blame us for not writing about a guy whose closest comp is a metronome? (To be fair, it would have to be a really great metronome.)

It’s cool to be unpredictable. Consistency just isn’t that cool. If it were, the name Constance would still be a trendy name rather than peaking in popularity 73 years ago. Over the course of his career, Freeman has missed fewer than six games in a season eight times and more than 15 games only twice. If I were him, I’d be really annoyed that there’s an award for the Comeback Player of the Year but no award for the Never Left Player of the Year.

Freeman is the preeminent line-drive hitter of this era, and luckily for us, this is the era in which we started keeping track of line drive rate. Excluding the 2020 season (a season in which Freeman was named the NL MVP and had a line drive rate of 31.1%), only four qualified players have ever had a line drive rate above 30% for a whole season. Freeman has done it three separate times. In the last 10 years, he’s led the league in line drive rate six times and never finished lower than 12th. According to our database, at 27.6%, he has the second-highest line drive rate of all time, behind Corey Sullivan, who played parts of five seasons from 2005 to ’10. Line drive rate is not usually as sticky as most other batted ball metrics. Freeman and Luis Arraez are the rare players who seem to be able to sit at the very top of the league year after year after year.

You know what’s exciting about that? It sets him up to age very gracefully. Freeman’s Statcast sliders for average exit velocity, max exit velocity, and hard-hit rate have always stayed solidly in the red, but line drives are valuable even if you don’t hit them that hard. As long as he can still drive the ball at an ideal launch angle, he’ll be able to succeed even as the power starts to go, and the home runs turn into doubles, and the doubles turn into singles. Which is great. It’s exciting — thrilling even. It means Freeman can just keep on doing what he’s doing over and over again. And again. And again.