Jason Heyward, Freddie Freeman and the bond that could spark the Dodgers

July 13, 2024

PHOENIX — Jason Heyward’s career lifeline comes with a reminder of where it all began.

Heyward met Freddie Freeman when they were teenagers, back when the two were prominent high school players from opposite ends of the country who just clicked. This winter, as he sought to resurrect his career, Heyward reconnected with Freeman.

The 33-year-old former All-Star stopped at Freeman’s home in Newport Beach and stayed there for a week in January, working out with his old buddy and hitting flips at El Modena High School in Orange with Freeman’s dad, Fred, who Heyward calls “Papa Free.”

It was like old times.

Years after being the top prospect in the sport and one of the faces of a youth movement in Atlanta, and following an unceremonious exit from Chicago after being one of the last men standing from what was supposed to be a dynasty, Heyward was still fighting.

But even he had to acknowledge the reality.

“Being real,” Heyward admitted, “I didn’t know if anybody was going to call.”

Freddie Freeman and Jason Heyward met as prep players before the Braves selected them both in the 2007 draft. (Associated Press)

The Cubs cut his $184 million deal a year before it was set to expire, announcing last August they’d release the erstwhile All-Star and Gold Glover at the end of the season. He hasn’t played in a big-league game since June, and didn’t know if he would again.

In mid-November, the Dodgers called. They called again the next day. And then the next.

If a team called, Heyward thought, he wanted to sign early, to get a jump on working with the new staff. That would give him a chance to tap into some of the offensive skills that had waxed and waned throughout his big-league career before bottoming out toward the end of his time in Chicago. His .606 OPS over the last two seasons was among the lowest in the sport.

Los Angeles presented an opportunity to correct that, and to go back to his roots. The Dodgers, he said, reminded him of how he started in the game. He admires their culture and standards, and that made the place an encouraging place to restart. This was more than just a chance to play; it was a chance to win.

“This,” Heyward said, “was different to me.”

Heyward signed a minor-league deal with the Dodgers, which included an invite to big-league camp. If he makes the club, the Dodgers will only have to pay him the league minimum as the Cubs continue to pay out the rest of Heyward’s deal.

He enters the organization with open eyes.

“If you have the last year and a half the way I had,” Heyward said, “you’d expect to make changes.”

He also came with the strong recommendation of his old friend. Freeman’s relationship with Heyward predates when each was selected as part of the same Atlanta draft class 16 years ago. So when president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman evaluated players available in the offseason outfield market, Freeman touted Heyward’s value in the clubhouse and the upside that still feels tangible. Freeman’s sales pitch started as early as August when the Cubs announced they wouldn’t be bringing Heyward back.

This spring, Freeman is hardly alone in his optimism.

“This guy, he looks like he’s 25 still,” general manager Brandon Gomes said of Heyward. “He’s an outstanding athlete. You’d have to imagine there’s still a lot of good baseball in there and we expect that.”

The initial results are promising. With what Heyward called a “significant” retool of his left-handed swing and a Dodgers outfield full of question marks, he’s made a compelling case to play his way onto the Opening Day roster. Manager Dave Roberts said the 33-year-old has “absolutely” separated himself in that battle.

Sensing an opportunity to get a jump start, Heyward showed up at the club’s spring facility in Arizona early and worked with some of the Dodgers’ support staff, bouncing between there, Southern California and Chicago, the place he’d made his home after signing the megadeal to be the Cubs’ final piece seven years ago.

After showing up so early, Heyward spotted his locker, pulled out his phone and recorded a video. He sent it to his oldest friend in baseball, the man who had long been pushing for Heyward to join the Dodgers. Now, Heyward and Freeman have been inseparable since camp opened. Their years of history together are palpable in the batting cage, in drills and even when one expresses faux outrage when the other opts for a different catch partner that day.

“This is as happy as you can get, for me,” said Freeman, nodding over to Heyward’s locker next to him.

“We’re just making the most of our time,” Heyward said.

For Freeman and Heyward, the bond goes back more than half their lifetimes. They were just 16 years old in 2006 when both players — Freeman, a lanky first baseman from Orange County, and Heyward, a powerful and quick outfielder from Georgia — earned a bid to a national All-American game in San Diego. Each was primed to enter their senior year of high school with expectations of being early picks in the following summer’s MLB Draft.

Despite being on opposite sides that day, “we drew to each other,” Freeman said. “We just became instant friends.”

A year later, they headlined Atlanta’s 2007 draft class, with the organization taking Heyward in the first round (14th overall) and adding Freeman in the second (78th). They didn’t spend much time apart after that, pushing each quickly through the minor leagues to extract the most out of the final legs of the organization’s extreme run of success in the 1990s and 2000s.

“When you are with someone who is like-minded in your goals and aspects of life and your outlook, I think that’s why we became so close,” Freeman said. “We just had the same passion for everything in life. You just get attached to each other’s hips and just go.”

They roomed together on the road. Lived together in A ball in Rome, Georgia, and again in High A in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where the two 6-foot-5 prospects took turns on long bus rides laying on a pool floatie in the aisles to stretch out their legs before scrunching in together into the same set of seats. Despite their large frames, they insisted on sitting next to each other.

“The craziest thing is the two biggest guys sitting on a bus together for 12 straight hours,” Freeman said. “But that’s what we wanted to do, was be right next to each other.”

That connection lasted throughout the minors as the two continued to shoot up through the Braves system. They got called up to Double A together on the same day in 2009, played in the Arizona Fall League together that same year and would earn their first invites to major-league spring training together shortly thereafter. Their friendship was clear, drawing the attention of the likes of franchise stalwarts such as Chipper Jones.

“God dang,” Jones would tell them, according to Freeman. “You guys are always together!”

Together for breakfast, for dinner, and sometimes both in only the finest of small-town fare.

“Sometimes,” Freeman said with a chuckle, “you’d eat breakfast at Waffle House and you’d eat dinner at Waffle House.”

The bond fueled a shared rise. Heyward became one of the preeminent prospects in baseball, with Freeman not far behind. Heyward debuted on Opening Day in 2010, commuting from his shared house with Freeman to Turner Field while Freeman drove to play in Triple A with Gwinnett; Heyward would be an All-Star that year, and Freeman would debut in the majors that September.

Together, they represented the wave of talent prying open the window of a dominant Braves run. Heyward became one of the game’s best defenders and a productive hitter along with it. Freeman’s mind-numbing consistency at the plate foreshadowed his MVP future.

“There’s a lot of method to that madness,” Heyward said of watching Freeman.

They did it together.

“They were like brothers from the get-go,” Greg Walker, Atlanta’s hitting coach from 2012-14, recalled recently by phone.

“I love him to death,” Heyward said.

With Heyward a year away from free agency and Atlanta’s window closing, they made a decision. Freeman got a nine-figure contract extension in February 2014, locking him into the club’s future even during a time of transition. Heyward would get traded that November to St. Louis, a deal Freeman still calls “devastating.”

A year later, Heyward got his own nine-figure deal, signing an eight-year, $184 million deal for a Cubs team that felt it was a piece away from snapping a 108-year title drought. They fulfilled that vision in October, with Heyward delivering a rousing speech credited for sparking an extra-innings rally in Game 7 of the World Series.

But Heyward’s production struggled to keep up. He’d posted a .631 OPS that first year in Chicago. His highest mark over a full season during his tenure there was a league-average .772 mark in 2019. As the struggles and injuries piled up, Heyward applied a series of “Band-Aids” aimed producing short-term results but they turned into a long-term deviation from what had made him effective.

Those Cubs had been labeled a budding dynasty. They made the NLCS again in 2017 for the third consecutive season and haven’t won a postseason series since. Pieces fell off over time, as did some of the magic of that run.

“The toughest part is just showing up to the field and not expecting to win,” Heyward said of his final months in Chicago. “That’s tough for anyone to do. … There’s transition in the game, it happens. There’s turnover.

“(Los Angeles) reminds me a lot of St. Louis, reminds me a lot of Atlanta with the structure and the everyday habits and the consistency.

“Chicago was, I thought, exactly who we needed to be at the time to win a ring. We needed to have some outside-of-the-box thinking. You got the day games. You got the curse. Whatever people want to call that stuff, the 108 years. All the different variables that were tough, we were who we needed to be. But coming here, it’s coming back to some roots in the game.”

The Dodgers’ plan for what Heyward needed to fix didn’t come as much of a surprise to him. He’d been trying to employ some of the messages they brought up, but they just hammered it home.

They simplified his stance, moving his hands back and quieting their movement before the pitch to have a more direct path to the baseball. The staff urged him to get more into his left leg as he swung, focusing on being more up and down in his way of attacking the pitch as opposed to relying on his hips to rotate and fire on time constantly. With that, they shortened how far his right foot strode to the mound mid-swing to allow him more room to maneuver before the ball crosses the plate.

“It sounds a lot easier than it is,” hitting coach Aaron Bates said. “I think he had a lot of habits that it took a lot of work for him to get out of. It’s nothing that he hasn’t ever done before. It’s just kind of giving him the why and the reasoning and allowing him to understand it and get back to it.”

Things are off to an encouraging start, with few louder in their praise than Freeman, who is entering his second year in Los Angeles after signing as a free agent last March.

“You’re going to see why he was a first-round pick,” Freeman said. “It’s in there. … I think he might have unlocked something.”

Tapping into that ability could be a boon for a Dodgers club that has plenty of questions in the outfield, particularly after non-tendering Cody Bellinger and watching the former MVP sign with the Cubs. It’ll also boost a clubhouse that lost impactful voices this winter in Bellinger and Justin Turner, the club’s longest-tenured position player who signed a deal with Boston in December.

Heyward’s already exerted his influence. After workouts at Dodger Stadium this winter, the 13-year veteran took 25-year-old shortstop Gavin Lux and 21-year-old infielder Miguel Vargas out. As the three dined at Arroyo Chop House in Pasadena, he paid forward what the likes of Jones, Brian McCann, Michael Bourn and Martín Prado had done for him.

“For a veteran guy like that, especially new … it’s pretty cool that he grabbed two young guys, me and Vargas, and said, ‘Let’s get dinner, let’s go chop it up,’” Lux said. “To pass that along, that’s this game,” Heyward said. “That’s this fraternity.”

It’s an example of how Heyward’s crossroads has represented more than just an opportunity to prolong his career, he says beyond even this year. It’s also a chance to reconnect with Freeman, a key member of his past, in hopes of a brighter present and future.

(Photo of Jason Heyward and Freddie Freeman courtesy Los Angeles Dodgers)

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