Inside MLB players' mindsets on playing all 162 games a season - ESPN

FREDDIE FREEMAN PLAYED in 161 games last year. He does not like this fact. Were it up to the Los Angeles Dodgers first baseman and likely future Hall of Famer, he would participate in every game of every season, all 162, a number held sacred throughout the game. Freeman has partly agreed to a compromise since joining the Dodgers — the day after they clinch a division championship, he'll sit, for one game and nothing more. When that day arrived last season, he still fought it.

«Until I'm told to sit down, I will fight you until you literally don't put me in the lineup card,» Freeman said. «But that's just how I view life in general. That's my job, I'm gonna do it.»

The task of 161 is every bit as trying as 162, but the allure is simply not the same. Even more in sports' load management era, the regard for playing all 162 has become almost mythic. Figuring out how to actually achieve it, though, remains elusive for nearly every baseball player. Since 1961 (when Major League Baseball expanded the schedule from 154 games), fewer than five players a year on average have played at least 162 games in a season. Of the 655 position players last year, just four — Arizona's Eugenio Suarez, Atlanta's Matt Olson, New York's Juan Soto and Texas' Marcus Semien — hit the mark.

It's not just the rarity that means something to this group. It's what goes into 162, the confluence of events that allow it to manifest. Baseball is the longest season in professional sports, a six-month endurance test in which the vagaries of life can waylay the goal of 162.

So what does it take to reach it? ESPN surveyed players present and past to understand how they weathered the roadblocks that prevent hundreds annually from joining the elite club, and a few