This article was originally published on October 30, 2024.
They asked Freddie Freeman what it felt like. How it felt. The question carrying, of course, the weight of all the context. How did it feel to hit a walk-off grand slam; how did it feel to hit the first walk-off grand slam in World Series history; how did it feel to hit a walk-off grand slam on one sorely injured leg; how did it feel to hit a walk-off grand slam in the year 2024, in the year he and his family have lived through, facing the abject horror, the desperate unfairness, of a sick child; how did it feel to be Freddie Freeman, at the pinnacle of the game of baseball, creating and living a moment that, in terms of raw athletic skill, in terms of historical significance to the sport, in terms of the number of people watching, the number of eyes, the number of hearts racing, the screams and the feet rising from the ground in a sheer jolt of energy, is beyond the imagining even of many of the greatest ever to share Freddie Freeman’s profession, let alone those of us sitting at home. They asked Freddie Freeman how it felt, because it was, as it always is, the first question, the impossible question.
He said it felt like nothing. Nothing. Like floating—no—kind of like floating. “Floating” is only a threadbare approximation of the reality. There he was, arm raised in the air, the end of the bat, swung seconds before with such leaden force, extending heavenward. Because it was weightless. Because he was weightless. The stadium shook with the sound of fifty thousand voices all amplifying each other, with so much sound that it became no sound, ears full to the point of unhearing, and all of the history, personal history and franchise history and the history of the sport and the history that is always unfolding around us, the history of people, together, trying to survive, collapsed into a deafening, all-consuming nothing. Nothing! Corey Seager, after his second World Series hitting like the sport of baseball was created for him to hit, said he couldn’t remember much of it. “A blackout,” he said. A black hole created by too much feeling. So many people feeling the same thing, at the same second, all of it directed to the same place. A tiny area of impact. Leather on leather, leather on wood. A few square inches. How could that possibly contain it?
And so we keep asking Freddie Freeman how it felt, how it feels, as if the answer will somehow be different this time, as if one day a player, whose skill lies in transforming the verbal, the idea of a game, a set of rules written in a book, to the purely non-verbal, the utterly embodied, will find the perfect words to describe it, to make us understand what it’s like. But we know how it feels, we already know, we wouldn’t be watching otherwise. It feels, as he said, like nothing. It feels like a dream. The feeling too big to fit into language’s constraints.
The context that makes us falls away. It comes back, of course, in seconds, or in minutes, or the next morning. That was only Game 1. Life, which is not nothing, the opposite of nothing, remains to be survived. But there remains an impression, an outline in the mind. Something lingers. For a moment, weightlessness was possible.
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