CHICAGO — Baseball is full of quirky journeys, and Mike Freeman may have journeyed more than anyone.
The Cubs infielder has worn eight different uniforms in two seasons, six of them just this year. But thanks to a six-year trek through the minor leagues before his first call-up and the constant of family to back him, Freeman has endured the constant flux and hopes he has found permanence in Chicago.
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On Aug. 31, Freeman and six of his Triple-A Iowa Cubs teammates decided to rent a 15-passenger van to ride together from a rainout in Memphis to their final stop of the season in Omaha. They had four days left in their season, and after months of grueling travel, they decided to make their last road trip a little fun.
For Freeman, the Iowa Cubs were his fifth team since the 2017 campaign started. Caught in the shuttle between Triple-A and the majors, he had played in Tacoma, Seattle, Oklahoma, Los Angeles, and now Des Moines. But instead of traveling with his teammates like he had planned, Freeman got an unexpected call from the Chicago Cubs. He was headed to the majors for the third time that season, and with his third team.
Two years. Eight teams between Triple-A and the majors. How does a player handle this?
“You kind of fly by the seat of your pants,” Freeman said.
When his professional life is so regularly tossed asunder, he clings to the one anchor he has: his wife.
“She has been the one constant,” he said. “... She has taken care of a lot of the little things behind the scenes that often don’t get noticed. [She’s] the biggest thing that has kept me grounded and kept me sane throughout.”
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Moving in and out of apartments, jumping on planes and busses, these are the other constants in the Freemans’ lives.
“It feels like you’re always moving, packing and unpacking, living out of hotels, that sort of thing,” Freeman said.
His time in the majors this season included a weeklong stint with the Dodgers at the end of June — after he spent the first six weeks of the season struggling with the Mariners before they optioned him to Tacoma — and then they, too, parted with Freeman, optioning him back to Oklahoma City and eventually designating him for assignment Aug. 4. The Cubs signed him just a couple of days later.
“There’s no real script to follow,” Freeman said, reflecting on the back-and-forth of the season. “I kind of felt like just about the time I would start to get comfortable with a team, I would move to another one.”
Freeman didn’t even debut in the majors until he had spent half a dozen seasons as a minor leaguer, so his level-headed attitude about his major league experience is one that was forged largely by the often unglamorous toil of the minor leagues. Freeman had already weathered the strain of wondering whether his call-up would come at all.
“There are a lot of really good players that deserve to be in the big leagues, and you’re just another one, so you start to wonder if it’s ever going to work out,” Freeman said. “You have to be in the right place at the right time and you need luck on your side. And for a long time, I didn’t have that luck.”
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But now, four major league visits later, Freeman has at least earned a place on a major league roster. With the Cubs, his locker sits in the arc of the Wrigley Field clubhouse that begins with Jon Lester on one end and ends with former Iowa teammate Taylor Davis on the other.
The progression in this row, from Lester to John Lackey to Jake Arrieta and then to Freeman and Davis, is a tangible marker of baseball’s natural and unflinching hierarchy, where both talent and luck are distributed unevenly, but the right mixture will put you in the locker room of a major league team.
Freeman had to grapple with that reality years ago as a farmhand in the Diamondbacks’ system.
“You can’t really think too much about the big leagues, because if you think you should be in the big leagues, it’s just going to grind away at you in frustration,” he said. “It’s hard not to have those feelings when you are grinding away in the minors, but you have to put those aside.”
Freeman, who has had just enough luck and persistence to get a taste of big-league life, knows that his talent alone would not have carried him to the majors. He has lost count of the number of players who, though more talented, never got close to where he is now.
“I don’t think I have ever been the best player on any team I have played on,” he said. “There’s a lot of really good players in the minor leagues who never made it to the big leagues that are better than me, guys on my high school team that were probably better than me, but they never made it to the big leagues.”
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In 2017, Freeman spent the final stretch of the regular season with the defending world champions, and as they head into the postseason again, his future — both the immediate and the long term — is uncertain.
“I would love to be in Chicago,” Freeman said before the Cubs’ last regular-season game. “I think I would be a good fit. … I would love to have a spring training here and have eyes on me a little longer to showcase the versatility that Joe [Maddon] appreciates in players.”
Absent from the NLDS roster and an unlikely candidate for the NLCS if the Cubs advance, Freeman’s future with the team is in doubt. He believes he has the right tools with his glove to stay in Chicago in 2018, but his bat is lacking. Freeman hit only .160 in 25 at bats with the Cubs, and his career average of .134 doesn’t suggest he is likely to do much better. But he’s had much better success in the minor leagues, batting .306 during his time in the Pacific Coast League this season, so the possibility is there.
But if nothing else, Freeman is ready for the persistence that it might take to find his place.
“I keep chasing opportunity, hoping that I can get to a place where I can show what I can do and the opportunity continues to grow,” he said. “[I will] keep going to another team, and if I hit all thirty and finally it clicks, then it’s worth it.”