Freeman's blast snaps Braves' HR drought at 15 games

Finally.

Freddie Freeman, one of few players on the rebuilding Braves' 25-man roster expected to be part of the future in Atlanta, snapped his club's record-setting 15-game home-run drought Wednesday with an eighth-inning solo shot off Boston Red Sox reliever Tommy Layne.

Before Freeman's cathartic blast at Fenway Park - the Braves' first homer since April 10 - he and his teammates had gone 563 at-bats (over 149 innings) without putting a ball over the fence. Over that brutal stretch, the rest of the league combined for 437 homers.

Still, throughout their historic power outage - the franchise's longest since 1946, when they were still based in Boston - Freeman tried to focus on the positive, namely his team's ability to string base hits together.

"It's hard to pinpoint something," Freeman said Tuesday. "It seems like we've been getting double-digit hits every game. We just haven't been getting those hits to turn into runs. As long as we keep hitting, I think things will start to change here. It is a little more magnified since we got off to this start."

Magnified, indeed. And though Freeman offered his teammates some much needed psychological relief in their eventual 9-4 loss, the Braves still have fewer home runs (4) this season than 32 individual players, including Steven Souza Jr., Jeremy Hazelbaker, Eugenio Suarez, and Tyler White.

"Get the monkey off the back," Freeman told Michael Cunningham of the Atlanta Journal Constitution after his team's eighth straight loss. "Hopefully getting that one out of the way we will start hitting hit a few more, especially when they need to count with guys on base."