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All I could control was my mindset and what I was about to do. Motte retired Mitch Moreland and Adrian Beltre to end the inning and keep the Cardinals within striking distance. So now, the Cardinals are down two runs, three outs from elimination, in the bottom of the 10th. Descalso leads off with a single to right field, and Jay follows with a single to left.
The Cardinals are in business. But when Jay gets a hit, La Russa reconsiders and goes with pitcher Kyle Lohse, who is a worse hitter but better bunter. My job was to do the opposite of hitting a home run. My job was to get out. The first pitch from Rangers pitcher Darren Oliver was inside and almost hit Lohse. The second one, he went after. And, well, just watch at the mark. Most people could have beaten that out. Texas shortstop Elvis Andrus reversed field, picked up the ball and threw Lohse out at first base.
A few years later, Andrus and Lohse were teammates. He makes it clear that he was embarrassed and distraught about the incident, enough so that he did something behind the scenes to flip the script. He credits Matt Holliday. After the DUI, the Cardinals outfielder told Freese, who is single and prefers living alone, to stick by him, that he wasn't going to let him screw up his gift. Last off-season, the two were always together, hitting, lifting and hanging out at Holliday's house. They talked about life, relationships, busting your ass and putting the bad behind you.
He's a big reason I'm still in this game. Throughout his ordeals, there was never any doubt that Freese could hit a baseball hard. He is tall 6'2" and slender for a third baseman, with a quick bat and decent pop. In career at-bats, he's hitting a solid. But freak injuries have kept him off the field for roughly half of his three big league seasons.
In , he had left-ankle surgery. In , when a rehab assignment took him to Double-A, he was rounding third base and blew out his right ankle so badly that he needed reconstructive surgery that took eight months to heal. Doctors cleared him for spring training in February but told him they wished his wheel had up to two more months to recover. No worries: A fastball to the hand on May 1 caused him to miss that much.
Funny how things work out. You'll have to excuse the pitchers from the Phillies, Brewers and Rangers for not laughing after Freese torched them with a. After going 1-for-9 with six strikeouts vs. In his first at-bat, he was late on a Roy Oswalt off-speed pitch and knew he didn't have a chance in hell of catching up to his fastball. Watching video in the Busch clubhouse, Freese realized the issue was that he wasn't planting his front foot quickly enough. Next at-bat, he doubled to give the Cardinals the lead in the pivotal game.
In the sixth, he hit a homer to seal it. Two hits to help knock out the Phillies would have been enough to elevate Freese to pinup status in baseball-obsessed St. Louis, but he wasn't done. Game 6 of the World Series will be replayed for as long as people search for poetry in sports, but it sure started out ugly.
The error-prone Cardinals committed three blunders in the first five innings, including a lazy popup that Freese took off his cap. With the valuable help of others, you have to keep fighting it off. Respectfully, I write this as one who knows. Not anymore. The fog has cleared. Being a hometown hero can make your head spin in many different ways. The move was made, in part, to give Freese a chance to get away from hometown pressure and traveling circus, take a breath, and reset.
He needed that. It was my dad being gone, he was a civil engineer who traveled a lot. So you start building this facade, trying to be something I was not. And the whole time, I was scared to death of what was going to happen to me after baseball. The facade is long gone. So is the mirror ball that reflected the good times, the regrets, the confusion and remorse. Man, all this stuff was real heavy back then. In October Freese was touched by the baseball gods.
The entire month of October was a remarkable fountainhead that gushed with base hits, home runs, doubles, runs batted in, timely heroics, a famous triple — and a swing to connect with a baseball and a boyhood dream that flew over the center-field wall like a backyard fantasy, touching down on the beautiful, green grass of home. It was a home run straight from the imagination of every kid, high school player or minor-leaguer.
Freese swung the bat for all of them that night. Not even after the Rangers took an early lead. The Cardinals were blinking at elimination in the World Series.
They were desperate to survive and make it to Game 7. The Texas Rangers had them down three games to two. The Rangers had them down in Game 6 … over and over again. The teams engaged in their own version of the third Ali-Frazier fight — only more insane. Manager Tony La Russa was a restless lion in the corner of the home dugout. From the closest spot to home plate he observing every movement, and you could see tension in his demeanor. Freese saved his team with the game-tying two-run triple — THAT triple — in the ninth.
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