Dodgers’ Freddie Freeman delivers a World Series title after months of anguish NEW YORK − It’s the wee hours of Thursday and Freddie Freeman was in a hurry, walking in the tunnel in the bowels of Yankee Stadium. The Los Angeles Dodgers had just won the World Series championship earlier in the night. He was voted the Most Valuable Player award.
He sprayed champagne with his teammates. He embraced his father on the field. He hugged and kissed his wife and son. He was just about to return to the raucous clubhouse when he was asked about that harrowing, emotional time in late July, the one that nearly turned his life upside down.
Freeman’s eyes moistened, his voice slightly quivered and he confided he was scared, terrified to be honest.
If the doctors didn’t come through, he might have missed all of this, the greatest triumph of his baseball career. It had nothing to do with his severely sprained right ankle, the one that left him in a walking boot, with his father, Fred, driving him for six hours of treatment each day in late September.
“I was watching him get pushed and prodded,” Fred Freeman said. “And for a week doing that, it was beyond what any human should do, and he was doing it. I don’t know any other person that could have done it.”
This had nothing to do with his struggles, a sudden loss of power, and sitting out in three of the Dodgers’ first 11 postseason games, hitting nothing more damaging that singles. This had to do with Maximus, his 3-year-old son. Freeman had to leave the team for eight days in July. He seriously considered the possibility of not coming back until next spring.
“Everything was going through my mind at the time,” Freeman, 35, told USA TODAY Sports in the aftermath of Dodgers’ 7-6 victory over the New York Yankees that clinched their eighth World Series title. “I knew I needed to be with my family. If Max was going to be OK then I was going to ultimately play.”
Freeman paused and then softly said, “If Max was never Ok, then I probably wouldn’t be here.’’ Freeman’s mind raced back to this summer. One day, Maximus is running around like every other toddler. The next, he’s getting a call from his wife, Chelsea, telling him that their son is fighting for his life.
Maximus was placed on a respirator for days, hospitalized for eight in a pediatric intensive care unit and had no feeling below his neck. He was diagnosed with Guillain-Barré syndrome, a condition in which the body’s immune system attacks its nerves. “The doctors eventually told us that Max was going to be ok,’’ said Chelsea Freeman, Freddie’s wife and mother of their three kids.
“But if that wasn’t the case, absolutely, I think Freddie would have stopped. It would have been too hard.” Fred Freeman, who raised Freddie and his two brothers by himself after his wife, Rosemary, died of melanoma when Freddie was 10, wasn’t sure it would have been possible for Freeman to return to the Dodgers this year if anything happened Max.
“Freddie is very emotional, just like his mom,” Fred Freeman said. “That Friday night, we weren’t sure if he was going to make it. We were praying so hard he’d be there in the morning. They started the medicine, put him on a breathing tube, feeding tubes.
He was paralyzed from the mouth down, and then after six hours, there’s a little shrug of the shoulders and the doctor said he’d going to be fine.” In three months, Max has slowly learned to walk again and be himself, marveling with everyone else as his dad put on one of the greatest offensive performances in World Series history, carving a permanent lace in Dodger folklore.
He hit .300 and had a 1.000 OPS with a triple, four homers and 12 RBI, tying Bobby Richardson of the 1960 Yankees for the most RBI in a World Series, despite playing only five games. He joined Babe Ruth as the only player to have at least two homers and a triple in the first two games of a World Series. He was the obvious selection for the World Series MVP, becoming the first Dodger first baseman to win the award.
“It does feel like he’s a Dodger now,” Fred Freeman said. “He’s definitely a Dodger. He feels like a Dodger. He looks like a Dodger. And he is a Dodger. “It was so hard with everything he went through with the season, all of the turmoil, Max, his ankle, good things should happen to him and they did.
