Freddie Freeman Praises Dodgers Recent Small Ball Approach on Offense
For the first 20-plus games of the 2023 season, the Dodgers were reliant on the home run ball. The Dodgers were hitting more home runs than anyone in the National League, but it wasn’t translating to wins.
The Dodgers were consistently staying around the .500 mark, and saw their offense have some huge outbursts and some disappointing duds.
This weekend against the St. Louis Cardinals, however, the home run ball wasn’t the key to success. In the three-game sweep of the Cardinals, the Dodgers scored 14 runs — and just three of them were courtesy of the home run. On Sunday, in the series finale, the Dodgers plated six runs, none of them coming via the long ball.
After the game, Freddie Freeman praised the team for finding a new approach to scoring runs — a winning approach.
“You can’t always win the games by hitting home runs and all that,” Freeman said. “Today, scoring runs a different way. The last 10 days, it’s much better baseball that we’ve been playing.”
While the home run ball is always good to have, the sign of a good team is the one that can score in other ways. Good things happen when you put the ball in play, and the teams that find ways to get extra bases and have productive outs usually find themselves towards the top of the standings.
While the Dodgers weren’t able to do that early in the season, as April comes to a close, it seems like they’ve figured something out.
Between injuries and paternity leaves, the Dodgers haven’t really had a consistent lineup yet; and they’re still not fully healthy heading into May. However, the team is definitely starting to get close to full form, and it showed against the Cardinals in the team’s best series of the season.
The Dodgers will hope to continue that momentum into a three-game set with the Phillies. Hopefully the Dodgers can continue playing small ball, sprinkling in the dingers when they need them.
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Don’t get too giddy, Freddie. The Cardinals don’t hit, pitch or catch very good right. Do that against good teams and then we can talk. Meanwhile, even the bad teams outhit us. We need more guys in the lineup willing and able to put the ball in play consistently. Oh, forgot to mention, maybe Mookie can get a few more hits?