After another championship moment, where does Freddie Freeman rank among Dodgers greats?

Another year, another instantly iconic homer from Freddie Freeman to lift the Los Angeles Dodgers to a World Series win. Last year it was the Kirk Gibson-esque grand slam off of Nestor Cortes in Game 1 against the New York Yankees. This time around, it was a little later in the evening: The Dodgers and Toronto Blue Jays still deadlocked at 5-5 after 17 and a half innings, Freeman finally sent everyone home with a dinger to dead center.

In the span of 12 months, Freeman has authored not one but two of the biggest swings in Dodgers history, at least one of which led to a title. (We'll have to see just how large Game 3 looms over the rest of this series.) It feels like just yesterday that Freeman signed with Los Angeles as a free agent; heck, there are plenty of baseball fans around the country — and certainly in the South — who still think of him first and foremost as a Brave. But at this point, he's become a central figure in modern franchise history.

And zooming out, he probably ranks more highly on any list of Dodgers greats than you might think. He's wrapping up his fourth season in L.A., but those four years have been so great that he just might already be the best hitter the team has had since they headed out west.

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The case for Freddie Freeman as the greatest Dodgers hitter since the team moved to L.A.

Any conversation about the greatest Dodgers ever begins (and, in some sense, ends) with Jackie Robinson — both for what he meant to the history of the sport and also, it should be reiterated, for the spectacular player he was on the field. And it's hard to argue that Freeman is ahead of icons like Pee Wee Reese and Duke Snider, Hall of Famers who spent the entirety of their careers in Brooklyn and helped turn the Dodgers into an American cultural institution.

But Reese, Robinson and other Brooklyn Dodger legends didn't follow the team to California, and Snider was already declining by the time he got to L.A. The Los Angeles Dodgers have a history and a fan base all their own, so it doesn't seem unfair to separate the two for the purposes of this conversation. And if we're limiting the discussion to just Dodgers who played in Los Angeles, there are very few hitters who loom larger than Freeman.

That probably comes across like hyperbole, or being a prisoner of the moment. Again, it feels like Freeman got to Los Angeles yesterday. And to be clear, we're just talking about hitters here: Pitchers like Sandy Koufax, Clayton Kershaw and Don Drysdale were just as great, if not greater, for a longer period of time. Those caveats aside ... Freeman really might already be the greatest hitter the Dodgers have had since the move to Los Angeles.

Above are the top four hitters in the franchise's history in Los Angeles, sorted by OPS+ (among players with a minimum of 1,500 plate appearances). There are just three with a better mark than Freeman's 151, with Mike Piazza and Gary Sheffield tied at the top at 160. But neither Piazza nor Sheffield won a single postseason series with the Dodgers; Sheffield never even played in a postseason game. Reggie Smith, meanwhile, had some big playoff moments as a star in the late 1970s but wasn't a major contributor on the team that actually won it all in 1981.

Given Freeman's considerable postseason contributions, both the two walk-off homers but also overall, it doesn't seem like a stretch to bump him up above the names ahead of him on this list. Of course, OPS+ isn't the be-all, end-all; great all-around players like Willie Davis, Ron Cey and Pedro Guerrero, all of whom spent more than a decade with the Dodgers, also deserve plenty of consideration here. But it's a testament to just how great Freeman has been during his time in L.A., and for a franchise that hadn't won a full-season World Series in some 35 years, his October heroics hold an outsized place in the modern history of this team.