Cole Freeman Has A Lot To Prove

High Class A Potomac second baseman Cole Freeman has accomplished quite a bit in his baseball career. He’s a Carolina League all-star who was drafted in the fourth round in 2017 as he was helping Louisiana State reach the College World Series finals.

Still, the 5-foot-9, 175-pound Freeman knows only one way to approach the game.

“I’m always going to feel like I have to prove myself to everybody,” Freeman said. “When I was drafted, I wasn’t as excited as I thought I would be because I hadn’t really done anything. No doubt I was excited and thankful, but there’s much more to come.”

Freeman was 5-foot-1 and 97 pounds as a freshman in high school. He said his father is 6-foot-3 and his mother is 5-foot-7, so the family took him to see an endocrinologist. He had a growth delay diagnosed.

“I think I started 26 months behind schedule, and then the last time I went,  I was 19 months behind schedule,” Freeman said. “I was pretty much always two years behind where I should’ve been.”

After playing baseball and point guard at Lakeshore High in Mandeville, La., Freeman spent two years at Delgado JC in New Orleans.

“I waited all the way until three weeks before college started, and luckily I was able to get an offer from Delgado,” Freeman said.

Freeman was a junior college All-American who chose LSU out of more than 30 offers from four-year colleges. At the end of his senior year with the Tigers, he was hampered by a right wrist injury that forced him to sit out the 2017 minor league season.

This season, Freeman has been a spark plug for Potomac. The 24-year-old was hitting .306/.402/.392 through 77 games, and he went 1-for-3 with two runs and an RBI in the Carolina League all-star game in Frederick, Md. He had played three games in center field and one in right field in his first outfield experience since high school.

“He’s coming to win a baseball game every night—somehow—whether it’s with his defense, on the bases or with the bat,” Potomac manager Tripp Keister said.

CAPITAL GAINS

— Potomac outfielder Nick Banks was the MVP of the Carolina League all-star game. The 2016 fourth-round pick out of Texas A&M hit a go-ahead three-run homer in the eighth inning to lead the Northern Division to a win. He went 3-for-4 with two runs and a walk.

— Double-A Harrisburg righthander Sterling Sharp, out with an oblique injury, is co-host of the Bump Day Podcast along with his brother Fred, who played collegiately at Bowling Green. “He basically started it,” said Sterling Sharp, who went 5-3, 3.99 for the Senators. “We finally got it rolling, and it’s been fun.”