For the Los Angeles Dodgers, life is good. On top of being the reigning World Series champions with the highest payroll in MLB, the Dodgers are off to a blazing start in 2025. Including their season-opening two-game Tokyo Series in which they swept the Chicago Cubs, the Dodgers came home to face the Detroit Tigers for three games at Dodger Stadium over the weekend. They won all three of those games as well.
Starting Monday night, the Dodgers welcome the reeling Atlanta Braves to Chavez Ravine, a team that has lost its first four games and on Monday saw their prize offseason $42 million free agent signing Jurickson Profar suspended for 80 games over a violation of MLB’s policy on performance enhancing drugs.
Things are going so right for the Dodgers that eight-time All-Star outfielder Mookie Betts, whose season appeared in danger when he lost 20 pounds with a long-lasting stomach illness believed to be a case of norovirus, has not only shown no lingering effects of the disease, he has had a torrid start to the season with two home runs â including a 10th-inning walk-off on Saturday â and four hits with a walk and zero strikeouts in nine plate appearances.
Freeman Weird ‘Mishap’ Finally Mars Dodgers Season
So what could possibly go wrong for the Dodgers? So far, not much. But on Monday the team saw its first sample of misfortune of 2025 when last year’s World Series MVP, who belted four homers in the five-game victory over the New York Yankees, suffered an off-field mishap that reinjured the same right ankle that he had surgically repaired in December.
The Dodgers’ 35-year-old first baseman Freddie Freeman first suffered the ankle injury in September, but continued to play through the discomfort. Freeman struggled through the National League Division Series and Championship Series, but came to life in the World Series with his four homers plus a double among his six hits in 22 plate appearances.
Freeman missed both games of the Tokyo Series with rib soreness, but returned to the lineup for the season-opening three-game sweep of Detroit.
Unfortunately, according to Dodgers Manager Dave Roberts, Freeman aggravated the ankle when he slipped in the shower at his home on Monday.
World Series MVP Now ‘Day to Day’
Freeman, like Betts, hit two home runs in his three games against the Tigers. But Roberts said that the 16-year veteran will not play on Monday against the Braves â the team that drafted Freeman in the second round back in 2007, out of El Modena High School in Orange, California.
Roberts did not give any detail on the extent of Freeman’s latest shower “mishap,” as he called the incident, but said that Freeman would be evaluated on a day-to-day basis. A trip to the injured list was not yet in the cards for the 2020 NL MVP Award winner.
Freeman spent the first 12 years of his career in Atlanta, and was part of the Braves 2021 World Series champion team. Freeman hit two home runs in that World Series and after homering in the first four games of the 2024 World Series, became the first player in MLB history to homer in six consecutive World Series games.
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