Meramec alumni David Freese has become a household name in the sports world
By: Spencer Gleason
– Sports Editor –
The assistant coach for the baseball Jaguars from the University of Southern Alabama leaned over to STLCC-Meramec Head Coach Tony Dattoli. Pleased with a young David Freese’s power to the left side, pulling the ball down the third base line, the recruiter’s main concern was if the junior college ballplayer could sit back and hit the ball to right field.
Dattoli went up to Freese and offered words of advice before he took batting practice in front of the recruiter.
“Hey, make sure you hit the ball to all fields,” Dattoli said. “He does not think you can hit the ball with power to right field.”
Freese focused.
Of the next eight pitches, the 20-year-old Freese hit six balls through the pine trees beyond the right field wall of Meramec’s baseball diamond.
“That was his ability to hit the ball to all fields. To see somebody change it up like that and change his approach, that is probably my favorite story about him [as a Magic player],” Dattoli said about his former player and now friend. “It was an indication that he really had a grasp of what we were talking about.”
Fast forward eight years later. After hitting a game-tying triple in the ninth inning and the game-winning home run in the 11th inning in game six of the 2011 World Series—the same kind of late-inning heroics that little kids dream up in their backyards—David Freese has become a household name in the sports world. He now finds himself recognized throughout sports and all of baseball.
By the start of the 2012 season, an authentic St. Louis Cardinal David Freese jersey was within the top 20 sold nationwide, according to Fox Sports—the only Cardinal to crack the top 20 list.
“It took what he did in the 2011 World Series to get his own jersey,” former Sports Information Director of Meramec athletics Bob Frischmann said. Frischmann, who has continued his friendship with Freese and his family over the years, spent the first two seasons of Freese’s Cardinal career looking for a jersey, along with Freese’s mom.
“I mean kids everywhere, not just in St. Louis, but kids who love baseball all over the nation now know who David Freese is and idolize him,” Frischmann said.
Freese, who has as many college graduating certificates as he does postseason MVPs, has continued to make trips to charities and help out in the St. Louis community, even if it was not within the public eye.
“He has bent over backward the entire off-season to help people. He has made so many visits that people don’t know about to Children’s Hospital, to veteran’s hospitals. He would spend the whole day there with the people, posing for pictures, visiting with them, talking to them,” Frischmann said. “He basically donated his entire off-season to all of these charities. I think that makes it even a better story – what kind of person he is and has remained despite the stardom.”
Aside from the World Series Championship, two MVPs, the “Tonight Show with Jay Leno” and “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” appearances, Freese has remained the same person Dattoli spotted as a high schooler at Lafayette High School and the same youngster that sat in Frischmann’s History of Film class in spring 2004.
“It’s just one of those crazy things that happen to a very select few in this world,” Frischmann said. “Fortunately in this case, it happened to the right person.”
