Sports
How Freddie Freeman — now back on a hitting streak — worked through early-season slump
On the surface, it might not have looked like much of a slump.
To star Dodgers slugger Freddie Freeman, however, his performance through much of April was certainly starting to feel like one.
Entering play Monday, Freeman was batting .306 with eight doubles, two home runs and 19 RBIs. He had a .861 on-base-plus-slugging percentage and 142 OPS+ (meaning, essentially, he has been 42% more productive than the average MLB hitter).
Those were drops from his first two seasons in L.A., in which he finished top-five in MVP voting both times.
But a slump? Really?
“I take pride in being consistent,” Freeman said. “And I’m not being consistent right now.”
That, at least, was what Freeman was feeling two weeks ago, in the midst of an eight-for-47 stretch that dropped his batting average to .259.
“I’m not hitting the pitches I’d normally hit,” Freeman said then. “There’s a lot going on up there. Trying to figure it out.”
There are points in every season where Freeman cools off, and his precise swing mechanics get out of whack. Almost always, it’s because his hips rotate too open, and his bat cuts short and across the strike zone — not square and straight through it.
The result: Freeman will stop hitting fastballs for opposite-field line drives, or barrel up breaking pitches into the right-center field gap. Instead, he will hit lazy pop-flys, or yank a ground ball to the pull side, or simply foul off mistake pitches he’d typically clobber.
“I’m not swinging at bad pitches,” Freeman said, at the height of his early-season struggles. “I’m just not hitting them where they should be going.”
The fix: A curated routine of slump-busting pregame techniques; especially a signature “net drill” in which Freeman will set up about an arm’s distance from a batting screen, then try to execute a swing without brushing the barrel against, hoping to recalibrate the inside-out bat path that has long been key to his career .301 batting average.
“I usually only bring it out 5-10 times per year,” Freeman said of the drill, which he has been doing since he was a kid. “That’s usually when things are really off.”
This year, Freeman dusted it off early, one of several notable alterations he has made to his meticulous pregame process.
In recent weeks, the 34-year-old has also started taking almost daily rounds of outdoor batting practice, a rarity during his first two years with the Dodgers (he typically prefers to hit in the clubhouse batting cages).
Overall, he has increased his total amount of pregame swings three-fold, he said, “just to hurry this [process] up.”
Lately, at last, better results have started to follow.
Freeman entered Monday on an eight-game hitting streak, going 12 for his last 27 with 11 RBIs and more extra-base hits (five) than strikeouts (four).
Half of those games have been multi-hits efforts. And in all but one, he has recorded a hit either up the middle or the other way — a telltale sign of synced-up mechanics in his swing.
“Everything’s kind of been working,” Freeman said. “Just been kind of doing really really slow, soft swings in BP, and then let the adrenaline of the game take the swing a little bit harder. Things the last week have been a lot better.”
It’s a welcome sight for the Dodgers, who haven’t often seen their $162 million first baseman struggle since arriving in March 2022.
“He’s gonna come out of it,” manager Dave Roberts said this weekend. “But there’s some sadness when he’s in a dark place.”
Phrases like “sadness” and “dark place” might not square with Freeman’s actual numbers.
Even at his recent low point, when a three-game hitting drought culminated with a three-strikeout performance on April 19, Freeman’s production was still comfortably above league average.
Even as he battled inconsistency at the plate, he still wore a perpetual smile, joking around with coaches and teammates.
“Sometimes players are in a dark spot and they really feel it and mean it,” Roberts said. “But Freddie knows he’s a great hitter … So I think he has some levity with it.”
Indeed, when asked last week if he was being superstitious by changing his hitting routine, Freeman referenced a line from Steve Carell’s character in “The Office,” Michael Scott.
“Just a little stitious,” he responded.
When told, jokingly, this weekend, he must be the worst .300 hitter in baseball, Freeman chuckled and shrugged.
“Feels like it,” he said.
Still, the reason this slump felt different, why the frustration was boiling much closer to the surface, is because it came on the heels of similar struggles last fall.
At the end of the 2023 regular season, Freeman batted just .262 over his final 17 games (a notable drop from his .339 average before then). Then, in the Dodgers’ postseason sweep to the Arizona Diamondbacks, his swing seemed completely off, resulting in a one-for-10 mark that loomed large in the Dodgers’ early elimination.
“That’s why there has been so much frustration,” Freeman said earlier this month. “Because I know what I’m doing wrong. It’s over-rotation with my hips, which causes [other issues]. It’s the same thing every time. But for some reason, I’ve gone through everything about 20 times already and it hasn’t clicked yet. So that’s why, here I am, hitting outside, doing little things differently, [trying to] smile through it.”
Finally, over the last week, it seems like the tide has started to turn.
In addition to his eight-game hitting streak, Freeman snapped another kind of drought on Sunday, hammering his first home run since the Dodgers’ home opener exactly a month earlier.
“No,” Freeman said when asked if he was worried about adding to his home run total, after it’d been stuck at one for 26 games. “If you’re just going for power when you don’t have a good swing already, it’s just never going to happen.”
But now, thanks to a laborious swing progression and trust in his hitting process, the moment offered the latest sign of Freeman’s continued turnaround; that an elongated (for him, at least) slump to start the season finally appears to be largely done.
“There’s still bad swings in there,” Freeman said, “but ultimately there have been a lot more good swings lately.”
Sports
Steelers’ Mike Tomlin laments ‘volatile rhetoric’ across sports after DK Metcalf fan altercation
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Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin expressed his support for wide receiver DK Metcalf before the star player’s two-game suspension for throwing a punch at a fan was upheld.
Tomlin didn’t elaborate on his reaction to seeing the clip, which showed Metcalf near the barrier between the Steelers’ sideline and the stands. The CBS broadcast caught the interaction, which showed Metcalf pull on the fan’s shirt and take a swing.
Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin looks on from the sideline during the first half at M&T Bank Stadium on Dec. 7, 2025. (Mitch Stringer/Imagn Images)
The longtime head coach acknowledged Tuesday the increasingly “volatile rhetoric” in sports.
“Not only (in) our business, (but) college, youth sport parents,” he said. “I think it’s just a component of sport that’s developed and developed in a big way in recent years, and it’s unfortunate.”
It’s unclear what the fan, who was identified as Ryan Kennedy, said to Metcalf that sparked the altercation. Kennedy was accused of making a racist comment and saying a derogatory remark about the player’s mother. However, Kennedy vehemently denied the accusations in a statement through a law firm. The statement said no hateful language was used.
Another report said that when Metcalf was playing for the Seattle Seahawks, he reported the fan to team personnel when he was in Detroit previously.
SEVERAL NFL TEAMS HAVE PLAYOFF-CLINCHING SCENARIOS IN WEEK 17
Pittsburgh Steelers’ DK Metcalf wipes his face on the bench during the second half of an NFL football game against the Detroit Lions, Sunday, Dec. 21, 2025, in Detroit. (AP Photo/Rey Del Rio)
Tomlin didn’t speculate when asked if there were more teams could do to protect players in that situation.
“Me speaking on it and speaking on it in detail and particularly expressing my opinion regarding things doesn’t help the circumstance in any way,” he said.
The NFL upheld Metcalf’s suspension on Tuesday night.
The league said Metcalf violated league policy, which states players may not enter the stands or otherwise confront fans at any time on game day and … if a player makes unnecessary physical contact with a fan in any way that constitutes unsportsmanlike conduct or presents crowd-control issues and/or risk of injury, he will be held accountable.”
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He will miss the team’s final two games of the season and leave a boatload of money on the table.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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January has traditionally been the harshest time of the year for the Kings, who haven’t had a winning record in that month the last three seasons. But winter grew dark and gloomy a little earlier than usual because December has hardly been a walk in the park.
With Tuesday’s 3-2 loss to the Seattle Kraken, the Kings head into the NHL’s three-day Christmas break having lost six of their last seven. And things aren’t getting easier any time soon: when the team returns to the ice Saturday, it will play host to the Ducks, who lead the Pacific Division in wins, before closing out 2025 Monday on the road against the Colorado Avalanche, who lead the NHL in wins.
“It’s not going the way we all want to,” forward Kevin Fiala said. “But you know, that’s going to happen for everybody. So it’s us who have to do something about it. Who can pull us out of it? Nobody else.
“I’m not worried. Like, I’m sure we’re gonna get out of this. But it’s not acceptable right now.”
And if it doesn’t change right now, the rest of the season will be as cold as a winter frost for the Kings.
It’s not just that the team is losing, but how it’s losing that is most concerning. The Kings (15-12-9) are 31st in the 32-team NHL in scoring, 30th on the power play and have scored more than two goals just twice in 11 games this month. That’s negated a defense that is second in the league in goals allowed.
“Sometimes it’s difficult to make sense of things,” coach Jim Hiller said when asked to explain a slide that has dropped the Kings into the middle of the division standings. “We just feel like we haven’t had a good run of games where we felt like, win or lose, we really like how we’re playing.
“That’s something that we’ll keep driving towards. We just haven’t had it yet.”
Last season, Hiller’s Kings tied franchise records for wins and points in the regular season and had the best home mark in team history. This season, they’re 4-8-4 at Crypto.com Arena, the second-worst home record in the Western Conference. And that has general manager Ken Holland answering questions about Hiller’s future behind the bench.
“I expect him to be here the rest of the season,” said Holland last week, not exactly a full-throated vote of confidence.
Yet for all their struggles, December has just been a continuation of the things that have plagued the Kings all season.
“We all have high expectations for ourselves,” Hiller said. “We just haven’t hit our stride yet. That’s the part that we’re chasing. That’s what we have to focus on. We have to hit that stride.
“It’s a difficult time right now, for sure.”
On Tuesday, Hiller tried to shake things up by mixing up his lines, most significantly pairing Fiala and Andrei Kuzmenko with center Alex Turcotte. And while Fiala and Kuzmenko both responded with goals, they didn’t come until the Kraken had taken a 3-0 lead.
The first goal came from Jordan Eberle, who was left alone in front of the Kings’ net, giving him plenty of space to settle a pass from Matty Beniers before lifting the puck around goaltender Pheonix Copley and under the crossbar for his 13th goal of the season. It was the fourth power-play goal the Kings had allowed in the last two nights and the sixth in four games.
The Kraken doubled their lead on a quirky goal less than eight minutes later, with Copley misjudging a deflected shot from Seattle’s Frederick Gaudreau, allowing the puck to knuckle off his glove then trickle through his legs for the goal.
Ben Meyers extended Seattle’s lead to 3-0 with less than four minutes left in the second before the Kings finally got on the board with an unassisted goal from Fiala, his 13th of the season, 11 seconds later.
Kings coach Jim Hiller watches from the bench during the second period of a 3-2 loss to the Seattle Kraken on Tuesday night at Crypto.com Arena.
(Luke Hales / Getty Images)
Now the Kings will have three days to think about that, although Fiala said he’d gotten over the game by the time he finished showering.
“If you win five in a row or lose five in a row or whatever, it’s forgotten. It’s in the past,” he said. “I think we take the good things with us and the bad things we hopefully analyze and get better at.”
For Hiller, the break couldn’t come at a better time. Or a worse time since the team’s current seven-game slump is its deepest since the winter of 2023-24. That one cost coach Todd McLellan his job.
“I hope the players are able to relax and refresh themselves,” Hiller said. “It’s been from September till now, with the schedule and how busy it is. And 85% of our games, we’ve been playing within one goal.
“It’s taxing physically and mentally. So I’m sure those guys need a break.”
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An internet rumor swirled last week that a longtime NFL reporter had died at the age of 40.
News of Jane Slater’s supposed death on social media, but she was quick to shut it down.
An X user posted a screenshot of a post on Facebook that showed Slater in black and white with the graphic “1980-2025” saying she had died at 40. Slater, 45, was born in 1980, but the years written in the post would mean she died at either age 44 or 45.
NFL Network sideline reporter Jane Slater stands on the sidelines prior to an NFL football game between the Seattle Seahawks and the Chicago Bears, at Soldier Field on Dec. 26, 2024 in Chicago, Illinois. (Todd Rosenberg/Getty Images)
“A veteran reporter who covered the Dallas Cowboys—having followed the team for over a decade—has passed away at the age of 40 after a tragic domestic violence incident, leaving behind a 5-year-old child. Her years of dedicated work, along with the heartbreaking circumstances surrounding her death, have left loyal fans stunned, devastated, and praying for her and her family,” the post read.
The user asked Slater, “did you pass away??”
Jane Slater speaks with T.Y. Hilton of the Dallas Cowboys after the game against the Philadelphia Eagles at AT&T Stadium on Dec. 24, 2022 in Arlington, Texas. (Cooper Neill/Getty Images)
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“I don’t think so? But does this mean there is (a) glitch in the matrix? I’m gonna wrap myself in bubble wrap until NYE,” Slater joked.
If there is one thing the Facebook post got correct, it’s that Slater does mainly cover the Cowboys for the NFL Network.
NFL Network reporter Jane Slater on the sideline prior to an NFC Wild Card Playoff game between the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Dallas Cowboys at Raymond James Stadium on Jan. 16, 2023 in Tampa, Florida. (Perry Knotts/Getty Images)
Prior to joining in 2016, Slater worked for ESPN and the Longhorn Network, having attended the University of Texas. She also hosted a radio show in Dallas.
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