“Please don’t take me,” said four-time Major League Baseball All-Star and Braves franchise first baseman Freddie Freeman, as he described to reporters the prayers he offered on his worst night of battling Covid-19. “I wasn’t ready [to die].”
The disclosure was as unexpected as it was raw. Freeman, after all, was not required by MLB’s coronavirus rules to identify himself as a player who tested positive, let alone to discuss his experience with the virus. These nondisclosure rules are underpinned by a ghoulish logic. It is not in the League’s interest for a marquee player like Freeman to test positive for the virus, let alone detail his battle with Covid-19, because MLB and its 30 aristocratic owners are both perpetuating and capitalizing on the unspoken secret of American sports: Fans are more likely to view the millionaire players as more entitled than the billionaire owners and, more significantly, have accepted that athletes dying for our entertainment is an occupational hazard. How acceptable that risk of injury or death is to fans exists not on a sliding scale of humanity but on a continuum of players’ talent and value to the team.
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