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What Are His Bad-Ball Bona Fides?
Dating back to his first full major league season in 2011, Freddie Freeman owns a league-high 927 hits against pitches in the shadow area of the zone. Nobody else even has over 900.
How Good Is He, Really?
There’s an obvious problem in counting good shadow-area hitters as good bad-ball hitters, and it’s that the area itself partially overlaps with the strike zone.
Freeman has thus gotten a sizable chunk of those 927 hits against pitches that were strikes. More pitcher-friendly strikes than hitter-friendly strikes, to be sure, but it seems safe to assume that knocks like this double and this single probably didn’t elicit that ol’ “How did he hit that?” query from anyone.
Freeman wouldn’t be on this list, though, if he didn’t also have plenty of hits like this one:
That home run was a good example not just of the reach afforded by Freeman’s 6’5″, 220-pound frame, but the strength as well. If he can get to it, he can drive it. And he can get to just about anything.
Yet let’s also give the guy proper credit for not always relying on his strength to rack up hits in the shadow zone. He’s generally not averse to simply getting bat to ball and letting the BABIP gods take it from there, and hits like this one, this one and this one show that he truly thrives at it in the shadow zone.