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.”
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Russell Wilson has had his share of ups and downs in his NFL career.
He helped the Seattle Seahawks to a Super Bowl championship in 2013 and was named to the Pro Bowl four times. But the last few years of his career arguably did some damage to his legacy as he’s spent the last three seasons with three different teams.
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New York Giants quarterback Russell Wilson watches from the sidelines during the second quarter against the Philadelphia Eagles at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., on Oct. 9, 2025. (Brad Penner/Imagn Images)
Wilson is still on the free-agent market as he looks to latch on to a new team for 2026. However, former NFL star Aqib Talib implored Wilson to hang up the cleats.
“Do your TV thing, Russ. It’s over with, man. Once you’ve got to decide, do I even want to play?” Talib said on “The Arena: Gridiron.” “I think you don’t really want to play. I hate when guys get to the later part of their career and then they start doing the bounce-around thing and they’re not going to win. There was no chip in New York. That’s just going to be another stop on your resume.”
Wilson reportedly garnered some interest from NFL teams.
New York Giants quarterback Russell Wilson stands on the field before a game against the Philadelphia Eagles at Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia, PA on Oct. 26, 2025. (Bill Streicher/Imagn Images)
He told the New York Post that the New York Jets were one of them.
Wilson also was reportedly a candidate to take Matt Ryan’s spot on CBS’ “The NFL Today” after Ryan left to take a front office job with the Atlanta Falcons.
Wilson has 46,966 passing yards and 353 passing touchdowns in 205 career games, but the 2025 season with the New York Giants was one to forget.
Wilson started three games and made some bizarre decisions in a loss against the Chiefs. Jaxson Dart was named the starting quarterback. As he came in to take a few snaps while Dart was being checked for a concussion, Wilson was booed.
New York Giants quarterback Russell Wilson watches from the sidelines during the second half against the Denver Broncos at Empower Field at Mile High in Denver, Colo., on Oct. 19, 2025. (Ron Chenoy/Imagn Images)
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Should he end up signing with another team, Wilson will be entering his age-38 season.
A lot has changed since Jacori Perry attended Morningside High School.
Perry is now a renowned artist who goes by the names Mr. Ace and AiseBorn.
The school is now known as Inglewood High School United.
And the lecture hall on that campus now features a large, ornate mural of a soccer ball being grasped by the hands of two people — freshly painted by the 2004 Morningside graduate as the city of Inglewood prepares to host eight World Cup games at SoFi Stadium starting next month.
Local artist Mr. Ace works on his mural at Inglewood High School United on May 11. The artists, whose real name is Jacori Perry, attended the school when it was known as Morningside High more than two decades ago.
(Eric Thayer/Los Angeles Times)
“If you told me that I would be back here painting one of the walls on this campus when I was in high school, I don’t think that I necessarily would have foreseen it,” Mr. Ace said as he was putting the finishing touches on his mural last week. “So I’m a little in amazement about just the way life works in that sense.”
He was one of several Los Angeles-based artists to participate in a Road to World Cup Community Day last month at Inglewood High United. Many of the artists — including Juan Pablo Reyes (“JP murals”), Michelle Ruby Guerrero (“Mr. B Baby”) and Angel Acordagoitia — sketched designs on portable panels (12-feet by 8-feet) and picnic tables for community members to paint.
The picnic tables will remain at the high school in front of Mr. Ace’s mural. The mobile murals will be placed throughout LAX to welcome visitors arriving for the World Cup.
Kathryn Schloessman, CEO of the Los Angeles World Cup 2026 Host Committee, said in a news release that the event was “just one example of how the energy of the World Cup can be felt in neighborhoods across our region.”
“Students, artists, and volunteers came together to create a work of art that will live on well beyond the end of the tournament,” Schloessman said. “It’s a reflection of the creativity, diversity, and community pride that makes our region so special as we prepare to host the world for FIFA World Cup 2026.”
Community members were encouraged to take part in the painting process, no matter their skill level.
“We made it easy enough for people that have zero experience to a proficient level of experience, for them to all be involved,” said Reyes, who designed and helped paint two mural panels and three tables. “We did the sketch, and then I tried to dab a little bit of color — whatever color is supposed to be there, I dabbed a little bit of color right there, so they would have a guide. …
Students and community members help paint a mural panel during a Road to World Cup Community Day event May 2 at Inglewood High School.
(Dawn M. Burkes / Los Angeles Times)
“I was right there, kind of supervising, making sure that everything went as planned. And if anybody has questions, they’re more than welcome to let me know about them. But, yeah, it’s pretty easy for them to kind of be involved and feel that sense of ownership and have a sense of pride that, ‘Yeah, I was part of that mural-creation process.’ It’s a rich experience for them.”
Acordagoitia sketched several table-top designs for the public to paint at the event.
“They did great,” he said of the community members. “They helped a lot. They were asking questions. They got all the other colors correct. So, yeah, they were excited. A lot of kids were excited to see the live painting, because now kids are used to being on their phones. So that was a great experience for them.”
Acordagoitia also opted to paint a mural panel on his own because “it was a little more technical,” involving portraits of his 8-year-old son, a nephew and a friend.
“I wanted to focus more on the youth because that’s really our future,” he said. “So that’s, that’s the main thing about the mural, just about the kids, soccer, culture, community. It’s exciting for me, because I grew up playing soccer and to include soccer with art, it’s just a dream come true.”
Guerrero said “the community was a big help in filling in all the background colors that I need in order to build the detail and layers” on the two mural panels she designed.
“My whole style is based on culture. And I think that there’s a connection there with the World Cup and how I feel like it brings together all the culture and just, like, celebration,” Guerrero said. “It kind of goes hand in hand with the type of work I do, because my stuff is really festive, celebrating culture. And just as an L.A.-based artist, I think the collaboration made sense.”
The four artists also took part in another Road to World Cup Community Day in downtown L.A. at Gloria Molina Grand Park on March 14. At that event, the artists sketched designs on large sculptures shaped like soccer balls and an oversized picnic table, also for community members to paint.
While Mr. Ace opted to paint his permanent mural at Inglewood High School United on his own, he was sure to include the community theme into his work.
“The idea was really centered around just creating something that was community-based — something that represented the World Cup but also represented some sense of community,” he said. “And so what I did was try to create something that was symbolic, very direct in terms of its relationship to soccer and figuring out through that how to create something simple that [brings] into that a sense of community. And that’s how I landed on the two hands holding the soccer ball.”
Local artist Mr. Ace works on his World Cup-themed mural at Inglewood High School United on May 11.
(Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times)
Back when he was a student on that campus, Mr. Ace said he was always involved in art and knew he wanted a career as an artist. He struggled to come up with the right words to describe how it felt being back there creating a work of art to be shared with the students, all of the community and everyone who happens to see it on the way to a World Cup match.
“I guess there’s no words to really describe it,” he said. “I think if any artist gets the opportunity to paint at their own high school — especially if they’ve been doing large-scale works around the city, the country or the world — I think that is a little touching. When it’s attached to something like the World Cup … you know, a large part of my childhood was spent in Inglewood, so coming from my circumstances and life, I think it’s even more intriguing.”
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The best Indianapolis 500 finish could be subjective, depending on which driver a fan was rooting for to win.
It certainly is in the eye of the beholder.
So take this list for what it’s worth. One view of the 10 best finishes in Indianapolis 500 history. Of course, it skews to more recent decades when the runs have come a little faster and the finishes have had a tendency to be a little closer.
We’ll add one each day to this list of fantastic finishes ahead of the 110th running of the Indy 500 on May 24 (12:30 p.m. ET on FOX).
10. Ericsson outduels O’Ward (2022)
After a red flag, Marcus Ericsson held off Pato O’Ward in a two-lap shootout. The shootout didn’t last two laps, though, as there was a crash on the final lap behind them. Ericsson had a comfortable lead when the red flag came out for a crash with four laps to go, a situation where in past Indianapolis 500 races, they likely would have ended the race under caution with Ericsson as the winner.
9. Foyt survives chaos (1967)
How does a driver who wins by two laps end up on this list? It’s because the win nearly didn’t happen on the last lap. A big crash with cars and debris littering the frontstretch just ahead of Foyt as he came to the checkered flag forced him to navigate through the wreckage for the win.
8. Sato can’t catch Franchitti (2012)
This was one of those finishes where the leader holds on for the win, but boy did the leader have to hold on. Takuma Sato tried to pass Dario Franchitti early on the final lap but to no avail and Franchitti sped off for the victory. This was one of those Indy 500s that made you hold your breath all the way to the checkered flag.
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