Dodgers' Freddie Freeman (4 HRs, 12 RBIs) named World Series MVP - ESPN
NEW YORK — Freddie Freeman set the course in the Los Angeles Dodgers' run to the championship with a historic homer — and kept right on swatting his way to World Series MVP.
Freeman homered in each of the first four games of the Series, then drove in two runs with a clutch two-out single during the Dodgers' 7-6 clinching win in Game 5 on Wednesday night.
While Freeman had a record-setting streak of six straight World Series games with a homer snapped, he just missed extending the mark to seven — Aaron Judge snagged a Freeman drive early in the game at the fence that might have just cleared the wall.
The numbers for Freeman in the series were certainly MVP-worthy — .300, four homers and 12 RBIs — but it was Freeman's dramatic Game 1 homer that set the tone for L.A.'s sweep.
With two outs in the 10th inning and the Dodgers trailing 3-2, Freeman pulled a Nestor Cortes fastball into the right-field seats at Dodger Stadium for the first game-ending grand slam in World Series history.
That was dramatic enough, but the blast almost precisely echoed the game-ending homer by the Dodgers' Kirk Gibson in Game 1 of the 1988 Fall Classic. The similarities were eerie: Not only was the homer a come-from-behind game winner, but like Gibson, Freeman was hobbled when he hit it. Freeman has battled an ankle sprain during the Dodgers' postseason run, a malady that required almost constant treatment.
Whereas Gibson's legendary dinger was his only at-bat of the Series, Freeman kept on mashing. He hammered a solo homer in Game 2 and and two-run homer in the first inning of Game 3. He homered again in the first inning of Game 4, another two-run shot, breaking a record for homers in consecutive World Series games set by Houston's George