Molly Knight has loved baseball since she was a child, so going to the All-Star Game at Dodgers Stadium in her hometown of Los Angeles was a special treat. The national baseball writer wasn’t there for work, just fun.
Knight has been cautious since the start of the pandemic. This was the first baseball game she had attended in 2022. She felt safe being at an outdoor event with her pregnant sister. She was vaccinated and boosted. Plus, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said face masks were no longer necessary.
Under those conditions, in a cruel twist, Knight suspects that she caught COVID-19 at the All-Star Game last month.
“We had a great time,” she told Awful Announcing. “I wrote about what a perfect day it was, and then I got violently ill three days later.”
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Knight, who formerly worked for ESPN and The Athletic, has been chronicling her health problems on Substack. Last summer, she joined the online platform to strike out on her own with an email newsletter called The Long Game. She writes mostly about baseball. She never thought she would be detailing the debilitating effects of the coronavirus.
“It has been a fucking nightmare,” said Knight who tested positive on July 22.
At first, the symptoms included vomiting, a sore throat, and a fever. Bad, but nothing alarming. After 10 days, she tested negative and felt better. But later, after recording a podcast, she felt like she was blacking out and that “everything was spinning, and I couldn’t walk.”
Over four days, Knight went to the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center emergency room twice and urgent care once. She was examined for a stroke, a blood clot, and a heart attack. She was diagnosed with vertigo and a sinus infection. Both turned out to be incorrect.
What was clear was that Knight had an abnormal heart rate and was experiencing severe dizziness, extreme nausea, and persisting vomiting.
“There were a couple of times I thought I was dying,” Knight said. “It was really frustrating. I had to go through a lot of it alone, because they wouldn’t let people come back with me because of COVID.”
Knight added: “I was feeling really angry. ‘Why me?’ Then also ‘Why not me?’ More than a million Americans have died from this. Yet, some people still think it’s the flu. It’s not the flu.”
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It took a while, but Knight got answers from a cardiologist. She was diagnosed with POTS-like symptoms. The acronym stands for postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome. It has been linked to COVID. According to the Johns Hopkins website, POTS can affect the autonomic nervous system, which regulates functions such as heart rate, blood pressure, sweating, and body temperature.
Interestingly, Knight had suspected POTS after crowd-sourcing her symptoms on Twitter.
“This man who lives in Australia slid into my DMs and said ‘Oh my gosh, you have exactly what my wife had. It’s called POTS,'” she said.
Knight is now on heart medication. She said her cardiologist is optimistic that she will eventually recover. Of course, there is no guarantee. Also, the drug that she’s taking, Corlanor, is not covered by her insurance. According to GoodRx.com, a 30-day supply can cost $600.
All of this has been hard to take for the New York Times best-selling author. Knight usually writes 3 to 4 times a week on Substack. Since falling ill, she has written only twice over the past month.
It has been a rough 2022 for Knight.
In March, Trevor Bauer filed a lawsuit against her and The Athletic for defamation regarding coverage of assault allegations. The suit claims that Knight and The Athletic “defamed Mr. Bauer by creating and spreading the false narrative that Mr. Bauer fractured the Complainant’s skull.”
The Los Angeles District Attorney’s office declined to file criminal charges against Bauer. However, Major League Baseball did suspend Bauer for 324 games due to a violation of MLB’s domestic violence policy. Bauer is appealing the two-year suspension.
Knight declined to comment on the suit.
She hopes to resume writing regularly as soon as the brain fog and fatigue lessens. The baseball regular season is entering its stretch run, and the playoffs are a little over a month away.
Knight is grateful for the support she has received from family, friends, colleagues, and her online community. Still, after avoiding COVID for two and a half years, this experience has her worried.
“I don’t know what the message is,” Knight said. “I’m really concerned that we’re measuring this pandemic by deaths, which of course, it’s a good thing that the deaths are dropping. I just worry that a lot of people are going to be disabled either temporarily or permanently. We’re not addressing that.”
[Molly Knight on Substack; photo from Knight’s appearance on Inside Sports in January]
