Freeman: Phillips in 2-hole good, Dansby will be fine

Dansby Swanson reacts after scoring the go-ahead run in the tenth inning Saturday at Philadelphia, in a game the Braves went on to lose. Swanson was dropped from the 2-hole to eighth in the batting order during the current road trip. (Photo by Rich Schultz/Getty Images)

Dansby Swanson reacts after scoring the go-ahead run in the tenth inning Saturday at Philadelphia, in a game the Braves went on to lose. Swanson was dropped from the 2-hole to eighth in the batting order during the current road trip. (Photo by Rich Schultz/Getty Images)

NEW YORK – Brandon Phillips was in the second spot in the Braves lineup ahead of slugger Freddie Freeman for the second consecutive game Wednesday, while rookie Dansby Swanson was in the eighth position for the third time in a row since being dropped from the 2-hole after his early season slump.

As Freeman saw it, having hot-hitting veteran Phillips in the 2-hole made the most sense for everyone including Swanson. The Braves were mired in a six-game losing streak before Wednesday and ranked last in the majors in average, OBP and slugging percentage from the second spot in the order.

“It’s big,” Freeman said of moving Phillips and his hot bat up in the lineup. “Brandon’s track record for his whole career speaks for itself. He’s obviously been a 100-RBI guy; I don’t know if the 100 RBI will happen in the 2-hole, but the start we’ve gotten off to – sometimes you’ve just got to move people around and get everybody else hot, too, and then maybe come back to the lineup that that’s what you thought you wanted.

“Right now Brandon ultimately could be our hottest hitter; he’s been hitting since Day 1. So maybe moving Dansby down and getting him hot, maybe we can come back to that lineup later on. But right now Brandon in the 2-hole is probably the best spot for him.”

Swanson went 1-for-20 over five games before getting a hit in each of the games Saturday and Sunday at Philadelphia. The Braves were off Monday and got rained out Tuesday.

During the Phillies series, Freeman and fellow Braves veteran Matt Kemp each talked with Swanson some to make sure he was in a good place mentally and wasn’t feeling the pressure after such lofty expectations were hoisted upon the hometown rookie.

“The one thing I obviously told him is, I got off to my (slow) start last year, and it’s not how you start it’s how you finish,” Freeman said. “The hardest thing in this game is to block out what everybody is expecting you to do in this game. He had 38 games in the big leagues last year and then this whole offseason it was this, this, this and this, ‘he’s going to be this and that,’ and as much as you think you can block it out, some of it creeps in. You’ve just got to let it happen. You can’t force things to happen. He is a very mature 23-year-old and he has a great head on his shoulders, and none of us are worried in this clubhouse. He is going to be just fine in this game.

“All he has to do is have a good week and (.139 batting average entering Wednesday) is gone. I just wanted to help him just clear his mind – he started off .080; I started off worse than him. So it’s all about just chipping away. I said to him, the hardest thing to do is walk to the plate and see .130 staring at you in the face. No matter where you look – you can look to your left and it’ll be on this little board over here, and then you get a hit and you’re hitting .145. It’s a tough thing to see your batting average that low, but you can’t get 10 hits in one at-bat and bring it up. So just keep chipping away.

“I thought the last couple of days in Philly he got a couple of hits and I think that’s just what he needs to do – get that one hit a day. He should have had a couple more because he hit the ball extremely hard. I think he’s probably had the worse luck out of all of us. He deserves better that what his batting average is showing. But that’s baseball, they’ll start falling (for hits) soon.”