St. Petersburg, Fla. — In this age of fantasy sports leagues, of FanDuel and DraftKings, where athletes have become merely stat lines, it’s easy to forget they are still human beings, regardless of how much money they make.
If you cut them, they will bleed. When they underperform, they hurt. They aren’t just a summation of numbers on a computer screen.
You can just cut Mark Lowe from your fantasy team, dismiss his statistics as useless, without any emotional recoil. But in the real world, a human being is still dealing with his failure — fighting through anxiety and uncertainty and working relentlessly to figure out what’s gone wrong.