Freddie Freeman’s right middle finger is still fractured.
But after sitting out three games this week, the Dodgers first baseman is feeling refreshed — physically, and maybe even more importantly, mentally as well.
“I think we would say it was a finger break,” said Freeman, who returned to the Dodgers’ lineup for Friday’s series opener against the Arizona Diamondbacks after missing all three games against the Baltimore Orioles earlier this week. “But I took the last three days to just shut the brain off and not really worry too much about things. Give my mind a break.”
At the end of last week, it was clear Freeman’s swing was out of whack as he tried to play through the finger fracture he suffered on Aug. 19, when he jammed his right middle finger fielding a ball in St. Louis.
In six games following the injury, the eight-time All-Star was only three for 23 at the plate, driving in just one run while striking out seven times.
Freeman said his finger wasn’t causing him pain at the plate (the biggest issue has been throwing the ball with a split on his throwing hand). However, it drastically limited his pregame workload, cutting his standard three rounds of pregame batting practice down to about just 10 daily swings.
“That was the big thing,” said Freeman, who hit a two-run home run in his first at-bat on Friday. “It’s more of, I couldn’t do my routines and practice like I want to and get ready for games.”
So, on the eve of Monday’s off-day earlier this week, manager Dave Roberts called Freeman with an idea: The team wanted him to take a few days off and let his finger — which will take four to six weeks to fully heal, but isn’t believed to be at risk of getting worse since it’s a non-displaced fractured — get a reprieve.
“Obviously, I pushed back Sunday night when Doc called me,” said Freeman, well-known for his reluctance to even occasional off days during the season.
But once he relented, the 34-year-old recognized another benefit of taking a few days off.
“I think we all knew the finger fracture wasn’t going to be not fractured in four days,” he said. “But once I got into the break, that’s when I was like, ‘You know what, I think it’s time to just shut [my mind] off for a second’ … It’s been a lot the last six weeks. So tried to take it as much as I could.”
By “a lot,” Freeman was referring to his 3-year-old son Max’s battle with Guillain-Barré syndrome last month, which left the boy temporarily paralyzed during a week-long battle in the pediatric intensive care unit at the Children’s Hospital of Orange County.
Freeman missed eight games while Max was in the hospital, and has been balancing his play on the field with his family duties off it in the month since.
While Max is now out of the hospital, he has been facing what Freeman earlier this month called “a long but hopeful road of recovery” in which he needed to “relearn how to do pretty much everything.”
“It’s been a lot in the last month and a half for our family,” Freeman said. “Grinding and making sure my kids are OK, [my wife] Chelsea’s OK, family’s OK.”
Prior to his broken finger, Freeman’s play hadn’t suffered. From Aug. 6-17, he batted .333 with three doubles and a home run.
But after Roberts’ insistence for Freeman to give his ailing finger a few days off, the veteran slugger realized the mini-reset might not be the worst idea.
“It was kind of nice not having to worry about sinkers in and cutters and curveballs and stuff like that for a day,” he said. “We’re all going a million miles a minute trying to do the best we can. So to shut off the little part of your brain to relax it for three days, it definitely was nice.”
That didn’t mean Freeman wasn’t restless during his three games on the bench.
“He’s a nuisance,” Roberts joked. “He just kind of doesn’t know what to do with himself. It’s a lot easier to manage him when he’s on the field.”
Indeed, after going stir-crazy in the dugout Tuesday, Freeman decided to spend the first inning of Wednesday’s game in the bullpen, joining in on the relievers’ contest of predicting when a teammate would hit a home run (Freeman incorrectly called Teoscar Hernández to go deep, left-hander Alex Vesia said).
Later in the game, Freeman disappeared into the batting cages during the seventh inning in a ploy of “gamesmanship,” he said, “so it would look like I might be getting ready” to pinch-hit.
On Thursday, Freeman finally prepared to return to action. He said his pain level had “subsided a lot” from the week prior. He successfully completed his three normal rounds of batting practice “without thinking about the fracture,” he added, before impatiently returning to the dugout for one last night as a spectator.
“I think all the coaches are happy that I’m back in the lineup,” he said with a laugh on Friday afternoon. “Yesterday, I was very antsy and restless.”
While Freeman’s finger isn’t completely healed yet, he is hopeful he won’t have any more flare-ups or require any further days off.
He said when he awoke Friday morning, ahead of a crucial four-game series against the second-place Diamondbacks at Chase Field this weekend, “all I thought about, was how to get hits and do the best I can.”
“I think it’s one of those things that, you really don’t know or can’t appreciate what you need until you do it,” Roberts said, concurring that the last week did as much for Freeman’s psyche as his finger. “That little break, I think, was really good for him. Now we can look and see a sprint for September, and that’s certainly doable for Freddie.”
