On Monday night, during a crucial bottom of the ninth inning, Freddie Freeman had a light-hearted, yet serious, request for Dodgers third-base coach Dino Eberle. He casually mentioned, “We need to send Shohei out at any cost,” referring to Shohei Ohtani’s potential as a base runner.
Otherwise, Freeman would have been facing a rather surprising role. He was about to take the field at third base for the first time in nearly a decade.
In a tightly contested game, the Dodgers edged out the Miami Marlins with a 5-4 walk-off victory. Manager Dave Roberts had been strategically using players off the bench to spark a late comeback. He pinch-hit for Alex Cole and Miguel Rojas in the seventh inning and replaced Rojas with Santiago Espinal for defensive purposes in the eighth. With a two-run deficit heading into the ninth, he aimed to give hot-hitting backup catcher Dalton Rushing a chance at the plate.
The issue was that if the game extended into extra innings, the Dodgers would have been short on players for second base.
So, Roberts devised a solution.
Rushing pinch-hit for Espinal in the ninth but remained at second base. As the game unfolded, things began to get… interesting.
Max Muncy, with considerable experience, stepped into the lineup, while Rushing took the position he had frequently played in the minors.
As for third base? The best choice for Freeman would have been to revert to the spot he last occupied for just two weeks back in 2017 with the Atlanta Braves.
Freeman later described the moment when bench coach Danny Lehmann first mentioned the possibility of him playing third. “My heart started racing a little bit,” he said, acknowledging the rare circumstance after not playing there in nine years.
Despite some initial disbelief, he was up for the challenge. An injured teammate, Quique Hernandez, even grabbed a purple glove from the clubhouse for him to use if necessary.
“We were okay going out like the sixth inning without anybody,” Freeman reflected, noting that he still practices fielding ground balls to maintain his skills.
However, he mused, “But, we were supposed to have a guy on second base in the top of the 10th inning…”
At this point, Miguel Rojas chimed in from across the locker room, jokingly saying, “They were going to bunt you, Bud.”
Freeman humorously responded, “And I was going to throw it into the stands with my bare hands.”
Luckily for everyone involved, that scenario never played out.
In the decisive bottom of the ninth, the team rallied to score three game-winning runs, highlighted by Ohtani’s impressive double before Kyle Tucker delivered a walk-off single.
Even with the tension in the air, Freeman was cautious and approached Eberle after he walked with the bases loaded, just to be safe.
Ironically, it appeared that Tucker, the hero of the moment, was blissfully unaware of the pressure. Freeman pointed out how Tucker jokingly suggested that if he’d known about the stakes, he might’ve tried to get hit by a pitch, which would have tied the game.
In the end, Tucker’s successful single to center field spared Freeman from a rather unexpected predicament.
