About five minutes into Game 3 of the first World Series game at Yankee Stadium since Hideki Matsui beat the Philadelphia Phillies in six runs on November 4, 2009, the crowd was full of hope that the Yankees would win after two close hits would make the breakthrough Los Angeles sang a vulgar chant for Freddie Freeman.

It didn’t span the entire stadium, but it was easy to hear as the crowd followed Reggie Jackson’s line, “They don’t boo anybody,” although it’s doubtful whether “Mr. “October” meant booing, which included vulgar insults.

A few pitches later, Freeman hit another home run, rattling the already excited crowd, which FOX commentator David Ortiz said lacked energy. When Freeman’s final home run hit the right field pitches, it gave him the distinction of joining Barry Bonds (2002) and Hank Bauer (1958) as the third player with home runs in the first three games of a Fall Classic, although those players did A World Series that went the distance as Bonds and the Giants lost to the Angels and Bauer and the Yankees made the same comeback as the 2016 Cubs by erasing a three-games-to-one deficit.

“For a man like Freddie, who doesn’t really need anything else to cement his legacy,” said Max Muncy, “this was a very special run.”

When it comes to facing New York’s baseball teams, Freeman is a special person because no team has been getting eliminated on a regular basis lately. The Mets avoided it in the NLCS because Freeman was sidelined with an ankle sprain on September 26, but most of their 207 meetings with him didn’t go well.

While Freeman’s .303 average is six points lower than Chipper Jones’s against the Mets, he is a .163 hitter in 24 regular-season games against the Yankees.

Unless the Yankees extend the World Series to seven, Freeman won’t come close to 14 hits in his regular-season games against New York’s American League team. The reason the Yankees need to be the first team to reach seven games after losing their first three games is Freeman, who is eagerly looking forward to possibly the fifth, champagne-soaked celebration of the postseason at the current Yankee Stadium to experience.

He has four hits in the World Series, three of which are home runs, making him a likely MVP barring a stunning Yankees comeback. The other is a three-pointer, just as impressive given the ankle injury that caused him to go 7-for-32 in the first two rounds.

“I guess I see the ball pretty well,” Freeman said, in an understatement for Mets fans and a remark that will always be the same for Yankee fans.

And perhaps even more impressive is that Freeman sits on one leg because of the ankle. He’s feeling better now since the Dodgers gave him six days off by sitting him out for the crucial NLCS game against the Mets, but still not at 100 percent.

“We went to Freddie several times and said, ‘Hey, we got you the last two series,'” Max Muncy said. “That’s Freddie telling us, ‘Hey, I’ve got you this time.'”

Freeman isn’t quite as disabled as Kirk Gibson was in 1988, but he’s still not fully healed. His Gibson moment came with the first game-winning grand slam in World Series history, fending off Nestor Cortes in the series opener after an ill-fated intentional walk to Mookie Betts in almost the same spot as Gibson, and his home run set off a series of at-bats sparked frustrating events for the Yankees.

A night later, he hit one of Los Angeles’ three home runs off Carlos Rodon, who appeared to be pitching with a blister. And after four pitches in his ninth World Series game, he did it again, giving the Yankees and the fans their worst-case scenario.

But even when Freeman was a little stymied, he managed to jump on three inside fastballs and hit them a total of 1,165 feet. And Freeman seems just as confident as all the moments in which he transformed into the cyborg Chipper Freeman or Freddie Jones in the encounters with the Mets, against whom he played for the first time on April 16, 2011.

“Of course we all know what a great player Freddie Freeman is. I think the couple of days after the Championship Series probably served him well and helped him, especially probably in the batter’s box,” manager Aaron Boone said. “He’s coming out of the swings like you normally see from Freddie, where that might not have happened in the previous rounds because of the injury.”

And while the Yankees are seeing the swings that Freeman usually makes, the ones they often see from Aaron Judge are missing, making it very likely that the Dodgers will celebrate their eighth title and toast Freeman as MVP in the near future.