ESPN baseball reporter. Covered the L.A. Rams for ESPN from 2016 to 2018 and the L.A. Angels for MLB.com from 2012 to 2016.
LOS ANGELES — The image of a triumphant Freddie Freeman from the night of Oct. 25, 2024 — midstroll, face stoic, right hand pointed upward — has been tattooed on body parts all over L.A. County. Freeman himself has signed four of them, three on shins and one on an arm. He used to go practically anywhere in Southern California without getting recognized, even in the areas where he grew up. Now that never happens. Fans approach him everywhere, many recounting precisely where they were when he hit the walk-off grand slam in Game 1 of the World Series that helped propel the Los Angeles Dodgers to a championship. Often they just say, Thank you.
“I’m happy about it,” Freeman said. “It means something good happened, right? You don’t try and hope for that moment to happen; it just kind of comes to you, and you hope that you’re ready for the moment. There’s so many times when I failed, and no one really remembers the failures.”
Freeman’s home run, the first of four in a World Series that saw him produce a 1.364 OPS and win MVP honors, has been depicted on countless bobbleheads, T-shirts and paintings. It has aired on Dodger Stadium’s videoboard before every home game and might continue being played there forever, much like Kirk Gibson’s heroics from 36 years earlier.
Freeman is hitting better than he ever has in his age-35 season, even while battling the same ankle injury that plagued him in October. Somehow, he has been more productive in his 30s than he was in his 20s. Reaching 3,000 hits, an almost unimaginable feat during such a pitcher-dominant era, remains a distinct possibility. The Hall of Fame is a near certainty. But one swing on one night will in some ways outshine anything Freeman ever accomplishes, a reality emphasized by the Yankees’ return to Dodger Stadium this weekend.
“And that’s OK,” Freeman said. “Something great happened for us to win a World Series, and I loved every second of it.”
Freeman is as stringent about his routine as any athlete, but he’s also sentimental. And while several of his teammates spoke earlier this year about the importance of moving on in hopes of avoiding a letdown, Freeman wondered why it couldn’t be both. In his mind, one can savor an accomplishment while preparing for another. He found himself wanting to marinate in that moment, largely because he has played long enough to appreciate its singularity.
One interaction with a fan, lasting all of three minutes, reinforced that.
Freeman was among a group of Dodgers players at a Jan. 31 luncheon for those impacted by the L.A. wildfires; it was part of the team’s annual community tour. There, a man recounted how he gave up drinking on the night of Freeman’s home run. Freeman can recall every detail from that conversation. The fan sat in the right-field section and vowed to remain sober in order to be more present for his two sons. Freeman’s home run ball sailed over their heads, and all his sons wanted to do was play baseball the next morning. Typically, the man told Freeman, he’d be too hungover to join them. This time he had the energy to play all day. The fan said he hadn’t touched alcohol since.
“Just chills,” Freeman said while relaying that story. “And you think about how not just baseball but sports can impact people’s lives in such a positive way that to be able to be part of something like that is a pretty special thing. I love this game. This game helped me get through hard times when I lost my mom and stuff like that; me and my dad would be out here playing baseball, doing things.
“It helps. And when you come full circle 25 years later, when you’re 35 and you create a moment for someone — that’s what this is all about for me. I love winning and championships, but to know that I was able to impact someone’s life in such a positive way — I still don’t know if I can grasp it.”
When Freeman crossed home plate, the first thing he did was dart toward his father, Fred, and high-five him through the netting behind home plate. Freeman’s mother died due to melanoma when he was 10. But Fred had also lost his wife. His entire life was turned upside down. Still, he continued to show up for his children. Baseball became their therapy. That fan’s story made Freeman think about how those two boys could be impacted by their dad showing up for them, too, and how one moment can have such a far-reaching impact.
“Sports is cool, man,” Freeman said, shaking his head. “Like, it can do so many good things for so many people.”
Freeman had struggled during the first three weeks of last postseason while playing through the right ankle injury he suffered on Sept. 26, the night the Dodgers clinched a first-round bye, and the rib injury he sustained a week later. Near the end of the National League Championship Series, he struggled to hold his front side in the batter’s box. Any attempt to put force on the ground caused Freeman’s foot to roll over. As it turned out, a Game 5 loss to the New York Mets was a godsend.
MLB had implemented a tweak in its postseason schedule that allowed the World Series to begin early if both leagues concluded their championship series in five games or fewer. The Yankees complied, dispatching the Cleveland Guardians in Game 5. But the Dodgers lost to the Mets, extending the series to a sixth game.
Said Freeman: “It changed everything for me.”
Instead of getting only three days off before the World Series, Freeman sat for Game 6, watched the Dodgers bullpen their way to a pennant, and by the time the Yankees arrived at Dodger Stadium for Game 1, he had received six full days of rest. He was suddenly a more complete version of himself, mobile enough to leg out a first-inning triple and flexible enough to turn on Nestor Cortes‘ 10th-inning fastball, sending it 413 feet to deliver one of the most iconic moments in postseason history. The Dodgers won the series in five.
“So many little things,” Freeman said, “and it could’ve gone so many different ways.”
Freeman felt good enough after the World Series to assume rest alone would heal his ankle. Four weeks later, he could barely walk. Imaging revealed he had torn four ligaments. Surgery was required. Freeman spent the next four months rehabbing methodically, then slipped in his shower on March 30, reaggravating his ankle and prompting a short stint on the injured list.
In his first 11 games back, Freeman batted just .250. His hips were opening too early and his swing wasn’t staying in the strike zone long enough, the continuation of a mechanical issue he spent most of the previous year working through. But a sixth-inning, opposite-field single against Paul Skenes on April 25 unlocked a feeling Freeman had been searching for. Since then, he is slashing .412/.474/.647 in 31 games. His .368 batting average and 1.065 OPS this season rank higher than everyone not named Aaron Judge. His 186 weighted runs created plus is tied for his career best, set during the COVID-19-shortened season, when he was named NL MVP.
A Dodgers team that was expected by many to challenge the regular-season wins record currently has 14 pitchers on the injured list and has had to scrap just to maintain a slight edge over the San Diego Padres and San Francisco Giants in the NL West, while sitting at 35-22. Through that, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts believes Freeman has unlocked another level of intensity.
“He’s dialed in,” Roberts said. “It’s not as lax intensity as he typically is; it’s more of an edgy intensity.”
Daily treatment on Freeman’s right ankle has been reduced from as many as four hours last October to as little as 40 minutes. It feels significantly better, but trainers have told him it won’t be fully right until some time around the All-Star break. Freeman still wears heel lifts in his cleats to alleviate some of the discomfort. His first few steps in the morning still come with agonizing pain. The Dodgers won’t let him steal bases, even when the time is on his side, a restriction that gnaws at him. But the production continues.
Freeman is on pace for 7.1 FanGraphs wins above replacement this season, which would represent the second-highest total of his career. If he gets there, he’ll rank seventh among first basemen in fWAR compiled between ages 31 and 35, behind only Roger Connor, Willie Stargell, Bill Terry, Mark McGwire, Stan Musial and Lou Gehrig. If he accumulates just 75 more hits, a near certainty if he avoids prolonged injury, he will have compiled more than 2,400 by season’s end, giving him a fighting chance at 3,000 in the back half of his 30s.
In his 20s, Freeman slashed .293/.379/.504. In his 30s, he has upped that to .317/.405/.533. These days, Freeman has an added incentive to remain productive:
He wants all those tattoos of his home run to hold up.
“I need to stay good,” Freeman said, “so that hopefully they still appreciate those in 30 years.”
Jeff Legwold covers the Denver Broncos at ESPN. He has covered the Broncos for more than 20 years and also assists with NFL draft coverage, joining ESPN in 2013. He has been a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame Board of Selectors since 1999, too. Jeff previously covered the Pittsburgh Steelers, Buffalo Bills and Houston Oilers/Tennessee Titans at previous stops prior to ESPN.
BOULDER, Colo. — University of Colorado football coach Deion Sanders announced Monday that he had undergone surgery to remove his bladder after doctors discovered a tumor there. Sanders said, since the surgery, there are no traces of cancer, and he will continue to coach this season.
In a packed Touchdown Club in the Dal Ward Athletic Center, Sanders appeared with Dr. Janet Kukreja, director of urological oncology at University of Colorado Cancer Center, and answered some of the questions that have swirled around him throughout the offseason.
The 57-year-old Sanders has largely been out of the public eye in recent months, save for an appearance at Big 12 media days earlier this month when he acknowledged Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark for repeatedly checking in on him and praised Colorado athletic director Rick George.
Sanders deflected questions about his health at Big 12 media days and previously had not publicly offered any specifics. In July his son, Deion Jr., posted a video on social media in which Deion Sanders is heard saying he was dealing with a health issue and that “I ain’t all the way recovered.”
In the video he was seen stepping into an ice bath as well as shooting a basketball and a walk with his daughter. Sanders said in May he had lost about 14 pounds as he had limited contact around the program during the team’s spring and summer workouts.
Sanders has previously dealt with serious health issues. He has had bouts with blood clots in his legs, had two toes amputated in 2022 and emergency surgery in June 2023 to treat the persistent clots, including one in his thigh in one leg and several just below his knee in his other leg.
On the field, Sanders is set to begin his third season at the school. With his son, Shedeur, at quarterback and Heisman Trophy winner Travis Hunter, college football’s most accomplished two-way player in the modern era, the Buffaloes finished 9-4 last season with an Alamo Bowl appearance. Sanders’ son Shilo, a safety for the Buffaloes for the past two seasons, has also moved on to the NFL, along with several high-profile players on offense.
The top storyline on the field for the Buffaloes is the battle to replace Shedeur behind center. In two seasons, Sanders completed 71.8% of his passes for 7,364 yards with 64 touchdowns.
It will be the first season Deion Sanders doesn’t coach a high school or college team with Shedeur at quarterback.
Seventeen-year-old true freshman Julian Lewis, a five-star recruit and No. 2 player in the 2025 ESPN 300, and Kaidon Salter, who started 24 games in four seasons at Liberty, will compete for the job.
Cleveland Guardians closer Emmanuel Clase on Monday was placed on non-disciplinary paid leave through Aug. 31 as part of Major League Baseball’s investigation into sports gambling, the second Guardians pitcher to be caught up in the inquiry.
Guardians right-hander Luis Ortiz remains on non-disciplinary paid leave after originally being placed there July 3 after unusual gambling activity on two pitches he threw for balls, sources told ESPN. Ortiz’s leave was later extended to Aug. 31.
In a statement, the Guardians said “no additional players or club personnel are expected to be impacted” by the investigation. The investigation, a source confirmed, has not turned up information tying other players with the team to sports gambling.
Clase, 27, is a three-time All-Star and two-time winner of the Mariano Rivera Award as the best relief pitcher in the American League. He finished third in AL Cy Young voting last year when he posted a 0.61 ERA over 74.1 innings. In 47.1 innings this season, Clase has a 3.23 ERA and has already allowed more hits this year (46) than last (39) while striking out 47 and walking 12.
His ties to the investigation that started following a June 27 alert from IC360, a firm that monitors betting markets for abnormalities, are unclear. Sportsbooks and gambling operators were alerted after a spike in action on Ortiz’s first pitch in the bottom of the second inning against the Seattle Mariners on June 15 and in the top of the third inning against the St. Louis Cardinals on June 27, according to sources. In both cases, unusual amounts of money were wagered on the pitches being a ball or hit-batsman from betting accounts in New York, New Jersey and Ohio, according to a copy of the IC360 alert obtained by ESPN. Both pitches wound up well outside the strike zone.
At the All-Star Game in mid-July, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said while he still supports legal gambling because of the transparency regulation offers, he was concerned about so-called microbets, such as ones that offer action on individual pitches.
“There are certain types of bets that strike me as unnecessary and particularly vulnerable,” Manfred said. “I know there was a lot of sports betting, tons of it that went on illegally and we had no idea, no idea what threats there were to the integrity of the play because it was all not transparent,” he added. “I firmly believe that the transparency and monitoring that we have in place now, as a result of the legalization and the partnerships that we’ve made, puts us in a better position to protect baseball than we were in before.”
Philadelphia Phillies star Bryce Harper stood nose to nose with Rob Manfred during a meeting between the Major League Baseball commissioner and the team last week, telling him to “get the f— out of our clubhouse” if Manfred wanted to talk about the potential implementation of a salary cap, sources told ESPN on Monday.
The confrontation came in a meeting — one of the 30 that Manfred conducts annually in an effort to improve his relations with every team’s players — that lasted more than an hour. Though Manfred never explicitly said the words “salary cap,” sources said the discussion about the game’s economics raised the ire of Harper, one of MLB’s most influential players and a two-time National League MVP.
Ahead of the expiration of the collective-bargaining agreement between MLB and the MLB Players Association on Dec. 1, 2026, multiple owners have stumped for a salary cap in baseball, the only major men’s North American sport without one. The MLBPA vehemently opposes a cap, which it argues serves more as a tool to increase franchise values than to lessen the game’s large disparity between high- and low-spending teams.
Quiet for the majority of the meeting, Harper, sitting in a chair and holding a bat, eventually grew frustrated and said if MLB were to propose a cap and hold firm to it, players “are not scared to lose 162 games,” sources from the meeting told ESPN. Harper stood up, walked toward the middle of the room, faced Manfred and said: “If you want to speak about that, you can get the f— out of our clubhouse.”
Manfred, sources said, responded that he was “not going to get the f— out of here,” saying it was important to talk about threats to MLB’s business and ways to grow the game.
Before the situation further intensified, veteran outfielder Nick Castellanos tried to defuse the tension, saying: “I have more questions.” The meeting continued, and Harper and Manfred eventually shook hands, sources said, though Harper declined to answer phone calls from Manfred the next day.
“It was pretty intense, definitely passionate,” Castellanos told ESPN. “Both of ’em. The commissioner giving it back to Bryce and Bryce giving it back to the commissioner. That’s Harp. He’s been doing this since he was 15 years old. It’s just another day. I wasn’t surprised.”
When reached by ESPN, Harper declined to comment. Manfred declined to comment through a league spokesperson.
Though he has not been outspoken on labor issues in previous years, the 32-year-old Harper, who is represented by agent Scott Boras, personified the union’s perspective on the prospect of a capped system. At the All-Star Game in Atlanta earlier this month, MLBPA executive director Tony Clark called salary caps “institutionalized collusion,” and in a February interview with ESPN, he said: “We always have been and continue to be ready to talk about ways to improve the industry, and we do a lot of things with the league to do exactly that. You don’t need a salary cap to grow the industry.”
The meeting with the Phillies — some previous details of which were reported by The Bandwagon — covered a variety of topics, sources said, but CBA negotiations, and their potential consequences, loomed large. The specter of a potential work stoppage going into the 2027 season has hovered over the game since 2022, when the parties agreed to a five-year labor deal that ended a 99-day lockout by the owners.
“Rob seems to be in a pretty desperate place on how important it is to get this salary cap because he’s floating the word ‘lockout’ two years in advance of our collective bargaining agreement [expiration],” Castellanos said. “That’s nothing to throw around. That’s the same thing as me saying in a marriage, ‘I think divorce is a possibility. It’s probably going to happen.’ You don’t just say those things.”
Though Manfred has not committed to pursuing a salary cap, multiple owners have criticized MLB’s current economic system and alluded to a cap as a panacea directly (Baltimore‘s David Rubenstein) or indirectly (Boston‘s John Henry, Pittsburgh‘s Bob Nutting and the New York Yankees‘ Hal Steinbrenner). Manfred’s regard of lockouts as a tool in negotiations further agitates players.
“It was pretty intense, definitely passionate. Both of ’em. The commissioner giving it back to Bryce [Harper] and Bryce giving it back to the commissioner. That’s Harp. He’s been doing this since he was 15 years old. It’s just another day. I wasn’t surprised.”
Phillies outfielder Nick Castellanos
Manfred began holding regular meetings with teams in the aftermath of the 2022 negotiations, having said that “one of the things I’m supposed to do is promote a good relationship with our players. I’ve tried to do that. I have not been successful in that.”
Despite the efforts, distrust in Manfred among players remains — particularly when discussing economic issues.
MLB’s desire for a salary cap dates back decades. The players’ strike in 1994 that canceled the World Series was in direct response to the league’s efforts to move to a capped system. Some of the same talking points used by MLB in the 1990s — particularly about the lack of profitability of teams amid an environment that has seen immense growth in franchise value and revenue — have reemerged in recent years.
“In the back of our heads, we’re like, ‘Why are you talking to us like owning a baseball team is like owning a nail salon?'” Castellanos said. “That you’re only going to be a functional business if you can make up the money that you put in this year?”
Players on multiple teams told ESPN they have used meetings with Manfred to press him on the lack of payroll spending by certain teams. Going into this season, the gap between luxury tax payrolls of the highest-spending team (the Los Angeles Dodgers at more than $400 million) and lowest spenders (the Miami Marlins at just under $86 million) raised ire among fans and made salary caps a far bigger part of the rhetoric surrounding the game than in previous years.
Public discussion has done little to alter the opinions of players on a cap. The benefit of meeting with Manfred, Castellanos said, is to better understand the league’s perspective on a business that made more than $12 billion in revenue last year. With the league aiming to nationalize local television rights by 2028 and the growth of gambling and other ancillary businesses, Castellanos believes education is vital to ensuring a well-informed player population.
“We don’t really know that much about it,” Castellanos said. “It’s not like somebody is teaching us about this conglomerate of Major League Baseball that we, the players, make up, make possible. There’s no players, there’s no Major League Baseball. I don’t believe Rob Manfred is evil. I don’t believe the owners are evil. I don’t believe any of that.
“Nobody wants a work stoppage in baseball. Not the players, not the league.”