It was a little less than two years after David Freese’s 2011 postseason heroics solidified the homegrown third baseman as a bona fide St. Louis Cardinals legend, while walking through a suburban Schnucks grocery store of all places, that something I had never really considered occurred to me. The day after David Freese saved the Cardinals’ season with a two-out, two-strike, bottom of the ninth triple and two innings later hit a walk-off home run to secure a seventh game of the World Series, he had to leave his home to go to Busch Stadium. Although, as a starter for the local baseball team, Freese was already fairly well-known in the St. Louis area, he had suddenly become the most famous, most beloved native Texan turned St. Louis superhero since Nelly. On his way to the stadium, he went past dozens of people for whom he was suddenly a legitimately significant figure in their lives. And it sounded terrifying.

For as much romanticism as there is for a bygone era in which, say, Gil Hodges would play stickball with little kids in Brooklyn on his way to Ebbets Field, there is a practical reason that modern athletes seem to live in a different world than rank-and-file citizens–being famous isn’t easy. There would be something romantic about running into Albert Pujols at the grocery store or something banal like that, but it would be a near-impossibility for somebody of Pujols’s fame to do something so simple without being mobbed. Our concept of what it is like to be a normal person living in a city is incomprehensibly far removed from that of a baseball star. Can you imagine Derek Jeter taking the New York City Subway, or Bryce Harper going to town at Geno’s Steaks? Even if they could, their experience would not be the same as yours.

David Freese may be the most pronounced example in modern baseball of a player whose local celebrity outpaced his on-field successes. While some of the discussion of David Freese’s Cardinals Hall of Fame case, one which saw him elected by the fans but saw Freese decline the honor earlier today, has centered around the impression of Freese as a two-hit wonder, this is overly reductive–David Freese, in addition to a solid NLDS and a deserved NLCS MVP award in 2011, was a solid player and a deserving 2012 All-Star. But it would also be condescending to pretend that Freese’s election was not largely built on extraordinarily narrow margins, ones which David Freese was surely very familiar. In a world where Albert Pujols is a fraction early on his pitch from Brad Lidge in Game 5 of the 2005 NLCS and pops up to end the Cardinals’ season, he would still easily be a future first-ballot Hall of Famer. In a world where Nelson Cruz gets a better jump and catches what would become David Freese’s Game 6 triple, he would never have even snuck onto the Hall of Fame ballot, much less been on track for a red jacket if he so chose one.

Life is a series of narrow margins; it would drive most of us mad to consider every little step that has impacted the trajectory of our lives. I am typing this sitting next to my wife, whom I met on a dating app where either one of us easily could have swiped left by accident (a thing I absolutely did at times in my single years). I am also petting my dog, whom we found on a website where, had we not been contacted relatively quickly by his foster home, we might not have met him. I am in the living room of a house that we only found because I thought some of the pictures of it on Zillow looked funny. Later tonight, I am going to hang out with a group of my friends that I mostly met in college, a college I very easily could have eschewed in the selection process and never would have thought anything of it. These are the kinds of forks in the road that most people encounter, but in the case of David Freese, he is constantly reminded, either consciously by others or within his own head, of his own luck.

I am relatively confident that I would enjoy being David Freese for a day. It seems really fun to walk into any restaurant in St. Louis and have people telling me how much they love me. It seems funny to do some boring task and have people geeking out around me–pumping gas in my car or whatever and someone glancing, recognizing who I am, and growing giddy over it. But David Freese doesn’t get the luxury of being able to stop that. He doesn’t get to turn off his fame.

To use an extremely different example from Freese in St. Louis, think about Steve Bartman in Chicago (I’m not exactly asking too tall of an order on a Cardinals blog, am I?). I think, coming up on twenty years since his infamous retrieval of a foul ball in Game 6 of the 2003 NLCS, Steve Bartman wouldn’t be particularly reviled on a day-to-day basis, but because he instantly ducked away from the public eye, Bartman has never had to worry about this. Would you recognize Steve Bartman if he were not wearing a Cubs hat and a Walkman? As much mythology was built around Steve Bartman needing to go into witness protection or some other dramatic gesture, you could run into him at Jewel-Osco and you would probably never notice it. He’d just be some generic white guy, and now it’s twenty years later so who knows? He’s nearly 50 at this point–he could easily be bald or gray-haired or have gotten Lasik surgery but you would never know. David Freese never got the opportunity to drop out of the public eye.

David Freese famously dealt with a lot of personal demons as a Cardinal. He dealt with a private battle with depression. By his own admission, he abused alcohol and he also had multiple drunk driving arrests. By the time he was traded to the Los Angeles Angels following the 2013 season, it felt like the Cardinals were doing him a favor, to get him away from his legacy as a hometown hero and to let him just be the best version of David Freese that he could be. Freese always showed gratitude in his return trips to St. Louis with the Pittsburgh Pirates and Los Angeles Dodgers, but he also seemed quite happy to move on to a different subject whenever possible.

Freese, who is now married (to a St. Louisan who doesn’t follow baseball, seemingly something which delighted David) and lives in Austin, Texas, has seemed to mostly come to some level of peace with his fame in St. Louis, but he also seems to largely want to avoid it. And that’s ultimately his choice, though I do wish David Freese were able to embrace his legacy. Unquestionably it was built at least partially on luck, but that he was able to capitalize on his opportunities brought a ton of joy to a ton of people.

But in the end, that’s not up to me to decide. And by eschewing his Cardinals Hall of Fame induction, David Freese is re-asserting his fundamental personhood. He doesn’t want to be David Freese, the avatar for St. Louis baseball. He wants to be David Freese, the husband and father who wants to live a quiet life far removed from the bright lights of Busch Stadium. Even if you would fantasize about being David Freese: Hometown Hero, it’s hard to begrudge the man for being the version of himself that he, in reality, has to be every day. And if he is happy with the version he is, who am I to object?