Mets Show Us The Value Of Freeman
Things To Watch In Georgia's Meaningful/Meaningless Opener. Trust Me.
It is the opening week of the college football season, which means it’s time for Georgia fans to enter their exasperating purgatory, you know, their program stuck between good and great in their tortuous pursuit of a national championship. The Bulldogs’ Alpha status is in question, always, in Week 1.
I should be leading this issue of Ball Atlanta with UGa vs. Clemson, but I can’t, not after the Mets just commanded us to dial 9-1-1…
The Braves need to sign Freddie Freeman.
Last Sunday night, some of the Mets replaced athlete empowerment with athlete foolishness. They flashed thumbs down toward their fans in Citi Field. It was really the players flashing a middle finger to the fans, who had rained boos on stars Javier Baez and Francisco Lindor.
The fallout was immediate. There was criticism throughout the boroughs and nationally and, worse, a sign of a lack of leadership. The Mets were imploding having gone from 4 1/2 games up in the NL East in July to 7 1/2 back last Sunday night. Their stars snapped.
And that brings us to the value of Freeman. The phrase you want to insert here is emotional control. The Braves’ clubhouse has emotional control because of Freddie. Player outbursts—the lack of emotional control—never get to the point of a public embarrassment with the Braves.
Leadership and poise are tangible intangibles and the Braves were under emotional control earlier this season when the wheels were coming off what they thought was a World Series season. The steady cadence of injuries and hum-drum play in mid-summer were maddening. They kept their poise because their leader kept his.
The Mets didn’t have the same emotional control and it showed this week with the ill behavior of well-paid players. That it was newcomers like Lindor and Baez, who have earned little currency with fans, or their teammates, means the franchise started to wobble Sunday and into Monday. The owner chimed in. The team president had to issue an edict about players taking on fans. Baez and Lindor were made to apologize by Wednesday.
It all reminded me of the excellent book written by Sam Walker of The Wall Street Journal, “The Captain Class”, which examined the traits of the athletes who were extraordinary leaders of exceptional teams. He wrote…
…the most crucial ingredient in a team that achieves and sustains historic greatness is the character of the player who leads it.
The Braves have not achieved historic greatness in the 10 seasons Freeman has played first base, but they have held together and sustained themselves with three consecutive division titles and a fourth in the works. His character is fundamentally part of this success, along with his bat. You know the bat, it can hit taters off the best left-handers in the league.
I think back to the Ronald Acuna, Jr., episode of 2019 and his youthful, careless, lack of awareness at not sprinting out of the box when he hit a deep fly to right-center. He had a single, instead of a double. Freeman’s lips in the dugout said, “We can’t have that.”
The manager, Brian Snitker, knew the team leader in the clubhouse had his back when he pulled Acuna from the game as punishment.
(Acuna didn’t understand even after the game what he did was wrong. Several Spanish-speaking baseball execs told me Acuna said in Spanish after the game that, basically, what he did happens all the time in baseball, that hitters watch fly balls. The translation to English from Acuna after the game was, “I was bad. I won’t do it again.”).
Ask yourself which player the Braves would be better off without right now: the supremely talented Acuna, who is injured, or the talented, emotionally controlled Freeman. In five years, when he has matured, Acuna, Jr., may be the correct answer, but not now.
I also read this from The Captain Class:
Buried inside an obscure 1997 clinical psychology textbook called Aversive Interpersonal Behaviors, there is a chapter titled “Blowhards, Snobs, and Narcissists: Interpersonal Reactions to Excessive Egotism.”
The paper concluded that self-centered people who project arrogance through their speech and body language tend to be viewed less favorably by others and can weaken a group’s cohesion.
One of the author’s of the study was a Wake Forest basketball player named Tim Duncan. Yes, that Tim Duncan, an NBA Hall of Fame center, who shunned the spotlight. The similarities between Duncan and Freeman are many, right down to the efficiency of their talent and humility.
Acuna’s youthful arrogance and his body language and lack of emotional control make him unfit as a leader in the Braves’ clubhouse. Perhaps he will get there some day, as he grows into the game. But Freeman rules the Braves in a stately kind of way, which is how a team going bad avoids the calamity that struck the Mets this week.
Ozzie Albies is the next leader of the Braves, but he is not yet ready to replace Freeman. The Braves have veterans who have calm voices, but they are short-timers, so Albies and, perhaps, Dansby Swanson are Next.
Hopefully, it will be five more seasons before they have to take the leadership reins from Freeman. Over and over manager Brian Snitker has talked this season about Freeman’s leadership. It is not a myth.
The Mets, meanwhile, have nobody like Freeman, who is both a star architect and a workmanlike bricklayer. Once upon a time, the Mets did have a captain they could trust. Third baseman David Wright was a leader for the Mets.
Instead we get this from Baez:
"We're not machines. We're going to struggle seven times out of 10. It just feels bad when ... I strike out and get booed. It doesn't really get to me, but I want to let them know that when we're successful, we're going to do the same thing to let them know how it feels."
Then the guy hitting .207 said of the fans, “They got to be better.”
Back at ya, scream the restless New York fans.
Baez is right about one thing, the players are not machines. But the average Opening Day MLB salary was $4.17 million in 2021; there are expectations. He may want to think these were old, white men, baseball diehards booing him in a racist fashion, but the crowd had youth and was eclectic. They didn’t like his play, that’s all.
This era of athlete empowerment took a wrong turn with the gestures from Baez and shortstop Lindor and outfielder Kevin Pillar. It became the era of athlete entitlement and a leader could have stopped it.
A leader like Freeman would have stopped it. A leader like him, Walker wrote in The Captain Class, would enforce high standards and be a guide. Freeman is so trusted in the Braves clubhouse, he doesn’t have to stand on a soapbox and preach. He is just watched.
I hope the Braves understand they could make a catastrophic mistake not paying Freeman in November when discussions open up about a new contract. Forget what he brings to the field, which is one good at bat after another and fine defense. It’s the leadership that also matters.
Freeman’s Fan Graphs WAR value this season is $29 million. The Braves are paying him $16.3 million. His Fan Graphs WAR value has been as high as $41 million when he was collecting $16 million.
Pay the man. For him. For the franchise. What do you think? $134 million over six, get five good years, and the last year is a “thank you for all the work.”
So much about the Braves is about the money, the money, the money. The Braves better not be cheap and let their Captain Class get away.
**
Now, about Georgia…
It is roughly true that the Bulldogs do not have a lot to lose Saturday when they play Clemson. College football has descended to a feudal existence—haves and have nots— because there are just four programs, as of today, who are legitimate national championship pot-hunters.
These four alphas (Alabama, Clemson, Ohio State, Georgia) have accumulated too many players for the proletariat. They have kept the best and second-best for themselves by successfully selling the second-string player on the value of in-week competition as a route to the NFL. Their message, “Why bother signing with anybody else just to be a mere starter when we have a first-rounder for you to scrimmage against three times a week?”
If Georgia loses Saturday, the opportunity to win a national championship and put an end to this decades-long drought of a title will still be there. And that’s what anyone cares about these days, right? Beat Florida, beat Bama, run the table. Done.
Then again…
…it is also roughly true that the Bulldogs— very much— have a lot to lose when they play Clemson.
Georgia is supposed to be a quarterback away from winning a national championship and now they have that quarterback, J.T. Daniels.
If Georgia loses to Clemson, the second-best program in college football, there is a chance of a permanent stain on the red and black, a persistent haze of vulnerability. And you know what they call that:
Can’t win the Big One.
It sounds diabolical to Georgia fans, but your program is one-step away from being…felt sorry for.
A win, of course, will be a status marker for Georgia. It will catapult the Bulldogs to No. 2 behind Alabama. The hosannas will flow all season.
A loss…and reminders that Texas went from 1970 to 2005 and lost status to Oklahoma and Nebraska in the Midwest.
Penn State hasn’t won a title since 1986 and Notre Dame since 1988 and neither can walk on the field any more before a game against an overmatched foe and hear the declaration, “This game’s over.”
So, Georgia fans, rather than bother yourself with the Big Picture… focus on other interesting subplots rather than, “Is Georgia doomed?” or “Is this Georgia’s year?”
*One curiosity you should have is the remade offensive line and how much time it allows quarterback J.T. Daniels to make explosive plays and when he calls the wrong protection. The Clemson defensive line is ferocious (and so is Georgia’s) and I’m wondering about Daniels’ ability to escape.
If the big play is not there with the pass can he run from the pressure and keep the chains moving? He is going to have to do that at least twice tonight in a close game to sustain drives.
*Clemson’s receivers are long and fearless and they go get the football. I’m wondering about the new UGa cornerback Derion Kendrick, who parachuted in to Athens in the spring after Dabo Swinney kicked him out of the Clemson program. Kendrick has first-round skill, but he also has character issues galore. Those issues aside, can he cover big-time wideouts?
He was habitually late to meetings at Clemson. He has two kids that take his attention. He had a gun possession charge and marijuana charge this spring. Kendrick thought he was going to the NFL last season and shied away from contact in some games. From my lessons at Scout School, NFL scouts do not ignore this stuff because it tends to come up again in the NFL.
The guy is playing for big money Saturday. He’s playing to get himself firmly in the first round. If he deals effectively with Clemson’s Joseph Ngata and Justyn Ross, who could be first-round picks, Kendrick would solve Georgia’s pressing issue of losing their two corners from 2020.
Other than that, I don’t care who wins this Meaningful/Meaningless game. I know one thing, for the first time since 2020, I am going to watch the college football season open at home…my home. The Pandemic of the Unvaccinated demands it.