One of Etobicoke’s top baseball star Joey Votto says he wept after watching a video of George Floyd’s murder by a police officer and then considering his life of white privilege.

Votto, 36, who was raised in Mimico, says he has many Black friends who are professional baseball players, whom he talked too, without listening to their plight.

He had just finished reading “A Long Walk to Freedom,” the autobiography of Nelson Mandela, about his 27-year prison sentence for fighting racism in South Africa.

In a column for the Cincinnati Enquirer on June 7, the athlete wrote at first he refused to watch the video of Floyd’s murder when asked by a Black teammate.

“I wept,” Votto wrote after watching the video the next day. “I texted my friend back and apologized.”

The 2010 National League MVP and member of the Etobicoke Sports Hall of Fame talked about his Etobicoke upbringing and his views on race.

“I was raised in Mimico,” the first baseman wrote. “It is one of the most culturally diverse cities in the world.”

He was selected by the Cincinnati Reds in 2002 and at the age of 18 began his career, traveling around the U.S. on buses, growing up in clubhouses that were predominantly divided between whites and Latinos.

“Most of our minor league teams had a few African American players,” Votto reflects. “And perhaps because of where I was raised, I found myself most comfortable with the group of Americans who weren’t white.”

“For five years, I shared hotel rooms with my African-American teammates,” he wrote. “We shared pizzas, played video games, and listened to music together. We developed friendships. I look back on these years as some of the best of my life.”

The athlete saw “glimpses of racism that should have opened my eyes to the realities of being a Black man in America.”

“My teammates, my friends, the ones that I shared great times with, faced prejudices that I never did and when they shared their experiences … I did not hear them,” he noted.

His privilege kept him from understanding the ‘why’ behind Colin Kaepernick’s decision to kneel during the national anthem.

“That privilege allowed me to ignore my black teammates’ grievances about their experiences with law enforcement, being profiled, and discriminated against,” he grieved. “And that privilege has made me complicit in the death of George Floyd, as well as the many other injustices that Blacks experience in the U.S. and my native Canada … No longer will I be silent.”

Votto made his Major League debut with the Cincinnati Reds in 2007 and is a six-time National League All-Star. He is one of the top players in major league baseball.