Freeman Fires Back at the Dinosaur Label as the Dodgers Face Elimination

Freddie Freeman heard the explanation for the Dodgers’ 3-0 hole and rejected it in plain terms on Thursday. Los Angeles has an older team, he accepted, and Los Angeles is playing badly in this series, and those are two separate facts. The New York Post reports Freeman made the case before Game 4 at Dodger Stadium, hours before an elimination game against Milwaukee, and finished it with a personal claim: he does not feel old.

What did Freeman actually say before Game 4?

That the age story is an opinion, and not one the numbers inside this series support. Freeman told reporters he does not follow outside commentary, accepted that the Dodgers are older than everyone else, and said the team is not playing well rather than playing old, the Post reports. Yardbarker, carrying the fuller exchange from the Dodgers Nation video, records the same answer with one addition: Freeman hopes that anyone watching on Thursday night concludes Los Angeles does not look old. It was a calm answer with a deadline attached, delivered by the second oldest player on the roster.

Where did the dinosaur label start?

With an owner’s joke that landed as an insult. New Padres owner Jose E. Feliciano used the dinosaur word recently, saying he meant the fossil collection kept by Dodgers owner Mark Walter, and the Dodgers chose to hear it as a description of themselves, the Post reported on October 10. Max Muncy said the team had heard it. Enrique Hernandez captioned a photo of the five eldest Dodgers with a Spanish joke about old folks. Dave Roberts said he liked his dinosaurs. The label worked as fuel while Los Angeles was winning, the same way the benching conversation around Shohei Ohtani worked while the series was still young. At 0-3, fuel and evidence start to look alike.

Is there anything to the age argument?

The roster part is true, the causal part is weak. Seven of the nine Dodgers in the lineup are over 30, and this was the oldest lineup in baseball last season too, Yardbarker notes, in a year that ended with a championship. What has changed in this series is narrower and uglier: the whole lineup has gone cold at once, Freeman included, with one hit in 11 at bats against Milwaukee, against a pitching staff that keeps the ball in the park. The Brewers have their own lineup story, having benched their captain Christian Yelich for Game 1 and won anyway. Age explains a slow April. It does a poor job explaining three games in which two throwing errors by Logan Henderson mattered as much as any birth date on either side.

Why does this argument keep returning to the Dodgers?

Because this core has played more baseball than anyone. Two straight titles, two season opening trips to Asia, and a veteran group that has logged the heaviest schedule in the sport over two years, which the Post’s October 10 account set out in detail. A rival scout said in late August that this was the oldest the team had ever looked, and September answered that, with the fourth most runs in the majors. The pattern is a team that looks its age in stretches and its experience in October, and this October the first half of that pattern is winning. Even the lighter Los Angeles story of the week, a Dodgers outfielder asking the league to drop its risque playoff ads, has an old clubhouse feel to it: a veteran team comfortable saying what it thinks.

What happens next in the series?

Game 4, on Thursday night, with no margin left. Milwaukee can complete the sweep and reach its first World Series since 1982. Los Angeles needs the only 3-0 comeback in Championship Series history, the one its own manager helped start as a player for the 2004 Red Sox, a parallel Freeman’s press conference kept circling back to. Roberts said he will not show his players the stolen base video, because some of them may not know he played. That joke, and Freeman’s answer, are the same strategy: treat the hole as a scheduling problem, not a verdict on the roster. By midnight, one of those readings will be history.