NORTH PORT, Fla. — This was a good day. It wasn’t like the game days last season when he was coming off two hours of sleep. Or the times when, if he wasn’t careful with the timing of his medication, that his vision went blurry. Or the time in Philadelphia when the elbow throbbed so much that he couldn’t shampoo his hair. Or the night in Washington when he used his right hand to brace his fall after a fielding play, and “I was pretty much tearing up on the field.”



But on this day, early in the Braves’ spring training, Freddie Freeman was smiling, not crying, as he was hitting the ground. Coaches put down a sliding mat on a grass field near a baseball diamond. Freeman, the lumbering sort, suddenly looked like a kid seeing a Slip-‘n-Slide on the first day of summer. He dove and slid head-first, and he was quite proud of his effort.



“How did I look? Was I graceful?” he asked me later.



I asked him if he...