Baseball is often about the numbers. There are one’s BA, ERA, ERA+, HRs, SBs, OPS, OBP, wOBA, FIP, K-BB%, FIP and WHIP. People even talk about one’s WAR—no, not that “war” but rather "wins above replacement." Members of nine major league baseball franchises, though, are now emphasizing the importance of keeping track of a particular number that can be a whole lot more important—one’s LDL-C.

Now, you may be wondering what this stands for and whether it’s something like “Left Double Liner-Catcher,” which would make no sense. But LDL-C is an acronym for “low-density lipoprotein cholesterol,” otherwise known as your “bad cholesterol.” And you’ll soon “C” why this number is so important for everyone—not just those in baseball—to follow.

CC Sabathia Talks About His Big Heart Scare

Speaking of C, former New York Yankee pitching great CC Sabathia, who is now 46-years-of-age, spoke from the heart, both literally and figuratively, when he described what happened with one year to go till the end of his Hall of Fame playing career: “In 2018, November, I had a heart scare. Um, more than the heart scare.” He went on to talk about how he and his wife “were in California and I wake up in the middle of the night and I started throwing up and I looked at her and I yelled at her, ‘Babe, I’m having a heart attack. I can just feel it.’”

That feeling did end up subsiding—for a little while, that is. Then, the 38-year-old Sabathia proceeded over the next eight weeks to have “these little mini attacks. I was going to the doctor, but my symptoms weren’t normal [for a heart attack].” Rather than your typical chest pain and tingling down the arm, “I was throwing up all the time. So we thought it was something wrong with my stomach.”

He tried to stomach his discomfort—like the “burning” in his chest—with stuff like antacids and anti-acids while dealing with “sleepless nights” of “sitting up on my couch.” One day in the middle of December 2018, though, at practice, his trainer “Stevie goes, ‘You need to go to the doctor right away.’ I went over to the hospital. They gave me a stress test. I can’t even give them 30 seconds of the stress test,” as Sabathia recalled.

Sabathia Had 90 Percent Plus Blockage Of His ‘Widowmaker’ Artery

That’s when doctors whisked him off to the cardiac catherterization lab, where they found an over 90 percent blockage of his left anterior descending or LAD coronary artery. That’s called the “widowmaker” artery that supplies blood to the heart. And you know that ”widowmaker" is not a nice and friendly nickname for anyone or anything. It would be kind of an insult, for example, to call your date a “widowmaker.”

Doctors then performed an emergency angioplasty and placed a stent in his LAD to get blood flowing fully through it again. “If you think about it, I could have passed away at 38 years old from a massive heart attack in the off season and not really know what was going on,” Sabathia said. He eventually was cleared to return to the field in January 2019 and later pitched his final MLB season.

Even though Sabathia was pitching in the big leagues at the time, he admitted to me that he wasn’t really paying attention to his diet and measures of his cardiovascular status. He told me how he would eat lots of bad-for-you food and skip regular medical checks that the team wanted him to do like EKGs and lab tests. He was basically paying more attention to his other numbers—his baseball numbers—rather than his life numbers.

Sabathia Now Pays A Lot More Attention To His Heart And Health

But that was a wake-up call for Sabathia. It’s one that helped him realize that it’s one thing to play with heart. But it’s totally another thing to play around with your heart. And I’ve written many times in Forbes , such as during the COVID-19 pandemic , about how important the heart is because it kind of keeps you alive.

The six-foot-six inch tall Sabathia looks much trimmer now than he was during his playing days when he was in the 300-to-342-pound range in weight. He used to follow the “mass equals gas” belief that a bigger body would allow him to pitch harder and faster. But now after switching to a Mediterranean diet and maintaining a regular post-baseball physical activity regimen, he is more in the 280-pound body weight range.

Aaron Boone Emphasizes The Importance Of Knowing Your LDL-C

Yankee manager Aaron Boone, who deals with numbers all the time, described cardiovascular disease as “a silent killer that can lay dormant that you could feel totally fine, but it’s so critical to know your number.” And by number, he meant “your LDL-C number, get with your doctor and playingwithheart.com , where you can go and get information about this.” Boone was referring to the “Playing with Heart” partnership that Merck began with WomenHeart and nine MLB clubs to raise more awareness about LDL-C and its role in cardiovascular risk.

Cholesterol, in and of itself, is not necessarily a bad thing. Your body does need cholesterol from what you eat to build things like cell membranes. And different lipoproteins are like little buses that carry different fats through your bloodstream to where they may be needed. LDL is one type of lipoprotein.

When your LDL-C levels are low, like less than 100 mg/d, you don’t have an elevated risk of cardiovascular disease. But that risk begins to rise when it moves to the borderline high range: 130–159 mg/dL. The risk gets even higher when your LDL-C is in the high (160–189 mg/dL) and then very high (190 mg/dL and above) ranges.

That’s because having all those buses in your bloodstream can mean that they drop off excess cholesterol where you don’t want it, like in the walls of your arteries, where cholesterol plaques can form. These plaques can then block the flow of blood to critical places like your heart muscles or brain. When in other blood vessels supplying other parts of your body, they can still break off and travel elsewhere—like again to the blood vessels supplying your heart or brain—leading to bad stuff like heart attacks and strokes.

Boone Talked About His Own Heart Challenges

“There’s obviously cancer, and there’s many diseases out there,” said Boone. But he emphasized that “heart attack and stroke are the number one killer." The now 53-year-old Boone himself has had some heart-felt experiences, so to speak, through much of his life that began relatively early in his baseball career. While playing baseball at the University of Southern California, he learned that he had a bicuspid aortic valve. He emphasized that this was not due to cholesterol per se because it was a congenital heart condition—meaning that it was there from birth—where instead of the normal three flaps or cusps, his aortic valve had only two.

That whole flap eventually led Boone in 2009 to get open-heart surgery to fix the valve, which can be necessary if a heart valve starts leaking too much or gets too narrow . He also in 2021 got a pacemaker placed after experiencing symptoms from a too slow heart rate. So, while this wasn’t necessarily due to cholesterol either, it has made him keep more pace with anything that can affect the heart and be one of the MLBers participating the “Playing with Heart” campaign.

The other teams beside the Yankees—yes, fellow New Yorkers, there are other teams besides the Yankees—participating in the campaign that started in 2025 are the Boston Red Sox, Philadelphia Phillies, Atlanta Braves, Houston Astros, St. Louis Cardinals, San Francisco Giants, San Diego Padres and Los Angeles Angels. Besides Boone and Sabathia, you’ve got other baseball luminaries such as Albert Pujols, Dusty Baker, Geoff Blum, Lou Merloni, Jake Peavy, Adam Wainwright, Javy Lopez, Jimmy Rollins and Charlie Manuel serving as ambassadors.

Darryl Kile’s Unexpected Sudden Death Led To The ‘Playing With Heart’ Campaign

Sierra Kile is involved as well. And that’s notable particularly because she is the daughter of the late St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Darryl Kile. The 11-year MLB pitching veteran with the 4.12 lifetime ERA passed away unexpectedly from a heart attack at age 33 on June 22, 2002. “He was a great, great pitcher,” recalled Cris Regent, associate vice president of U.S. Pharma Cardiovascular and Metabolic at Merck, “He was all set to pitch that day, didn’t show up in the morning and they went back to his room at the hotel, I guess. And they found he had passed away in a sleep of a heart attack.”

Regent added, “And that was driven by high LDL. It was later talked about how his dad had passed away and his grandfather had passed away with the same thing.” Regent emphasized how Kile “was a great athlete. He probably felt like he was at the top of his game. He was healthy. He worked out,” but a silent eventually got to him. An autopsy revealed 90 percent blockage in two of Kile’s three main coronary arteries and an enlarged heart.

Regent then talked about how this eventually led to the “Playing with Heart” campaign. “So we saw that story and what had happened there and how it touched the city. And we talked to Sierra and her mom and said, ‘Look, we’re interested in bringing us to the attention of folks.’" One thing led to another and “Sierra then became a spokesperson for us for the start of it, which was last September in St. Louis, and all through the season now.” Yes, things started with the Cardinals and WomenHeart—because not everything starts with the Yankees.

How Often Should You Get Your LDL-C Checked

Regents talked about how many people don’t even though their LDL-C even though it can be checked through a simple blood test. Current guidelines recommend that children and adolescents get tested at least once between ages 9 and 11, and again between ages 17 and 21, just in case they have a congenital condition that may elevate levels.

After that, it’s good to check your LDL-C at least every four to six years until you reach your mid-40s. So if you regularly use words like “delulu” and “touch grass” and are thus GenZ, you should be touching base with your doctor about LDL-C at least that often. Being at higher risk for cardiovascular disease may mean more frequent checking—like every year.

Once you get to the 45 to 64 years of age range, even if you aren’t at higher risk, you may want to switch to screening every one to two years. Then at age 65 and beyond, screening should be every year. So every “Boomer” should definitely be saying “OK, test my LDL-C” in 2026. And then 2027. And so forth.

So while it’s OK to have a ball in your life and play with heart, you don’t want to play around too much with your health and heart. Anyone in baseball knows the importance of following numbers. And the LDL-C is one you should definitely see.