{"id":856934,"date":"2026-08-13T19:42:17","date_gmt":"2026-08-13T19:42:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/856934\/"},"modified":"2026-08-13T19:42:17","modified_gmt":"2026-08-13T19:42:17","slug":"freddie-freeman-avoids-injury-in-dugout-fall-nbc-los-angeles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/856934\/","title":{"rendered":"Freddie Freeman avoids injury in dugout fall \u2013 NBC Los Angeles"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Freddie Freeman apparently avoided serious injury Wednesday night when the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nbclosangeles.com\/tag\/los-angeles-dodgers\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Los Angeles Dodgers<\/a>&#8216; first baseman took\u00a0a frightening tumble down the stairs\u00a0and into the visitors&#8217; dugout while trying to catch a foul popup in the eighth inning.<\/p>\n<p>Freeman isn&#8217;t sure whether he&#8217;ll play when the Dodgers begin an important four-game series with the MLB-leading Milwaukee Brewers on Thursday, but he&#8217;s grateful his freefall to the dugout floor wasn&#8217;t worse.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI didn&#8217;t hit my head, so that was the key part there,\u201d Freeman said. \u201cI am sore. Kneecaps are sore. Shoulder is sore. Hand sore. Wrist sore. I mean, I fell. (But) I&#8217;m in good spirits.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Freeman stayed in the game and finished the top of the eighth, but Tommy Edman pinch hit for him in the bottom of the inning before\u00a0Los Angeles closed out a 4-2 victory over the Kansas City Royals, its fourth in five games.<\/p>\n<p>The right side of Freeman&#8217;s body took the punishment, but the 2024 World Series MVP apparently didn&#8217;t break any bones. He&#8217;ll wait to see how he feels in the morning before he decides whether to play Thursday night when the back-to-back World Series champion Dodgers welcome Milwaukee in a reamtch of last year&#8217;s National League Championship Series.<\/p>\n<p>Freeman said he simply miscalculated the location of the dugout railing while he tracked Isaac Collins&#8217; foul pop.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI went to lean, like I was going to lean against the rail to catch the ball \u2014 and obviously there was no rail,\u201d Freeman said with a smile.<\/p>\n<p>Freeman, who turns 37 in one month, said he was fortunate to fall all the way into the dugout, missing the top flight of stairs entirely. That&#8217;s because when he landed, his head stuck out into the open space above the second flight of stairs that goes down into the visitors&#8217; clubhouse instead of banging on the ground.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cLuckily, I was tall, so I missed everything else,\u201d the 6-foot-4 Freeman cracked.<\/p>\n<p>This wasn\u2019t Freeman\u2019s first fielding misadventure: He said he fell into the seats in Arizona roughly a decade ago while he was with the Atlanta Braves.<\/p>\n<p>The Orange County native and childhood Angels fan also said he still remembers the infamous 1999 opening-day dugout fall by Mo Vaughn, who got hurt on the first play of his first game with the Halos.<\/p>\n<p>The Royals rushed to Freeman&#8217;s side after the fall, urging him to stay on the ground. Freeman decided to get up anyway, and the Dodgers&#8217; training staff rushed across the field to check on him.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI think that we really dodged a bullet,\u201d Los Angeles manager Dave Roberts said. \u201cVery scary visually. For right now, he&#8217;s in good spirits, which I think is a good sign. Just kind of total body soreness.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Freddie Freeman apparently avoided serious injury Wednesday night when the Los Angeles Dodgers&#8216; first baseman took\u00a0a frightening tumble&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":856935,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[435],"tags":[49,48,511,487,462,82],"class_list":["post-856934","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-dodgers","tag-los-angeles-dodgers","tag-mlb","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/856934","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=856934"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/856934\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/856935"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=856934"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=856934"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=856934"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}