Canada’s vaccine mandate saves lives. It promotes good public health. It also helps baseball fans know which players can be bothered to care about winning.
Canada, like the United States, requires all non-citizen travelers to provide proof of vaccination against COVID-19 to enter the country. That means anyone whose team is scheduled to play on the road against the Toronto Blue Jays has a chance to demonstrate their priorities.
Sometimes players tell you with their actions, as when the unvaccinated Red Sox closer Tanner Hoke watched from afar as his team coughed up late-inning losses in four games in Toronto. And sometimes they say it with their words. Royals second baseman and outfielder Whit Merrifield, who Kansas City announced Wednesday is one of 10 players — nearly 40 percent of the roster — who will be ineligible for this weekend’s series in Toronto, told reporters , “The only reason I would think about getting [the vaccine] at this point is to go to canada. This may change down the road. Something happens and I get on a team that has a chance to go play in Canada after the season, maybe that will change. But as we sit here right now, I’m happy with my decision.
Did you catch this? If Merrifield played for a good team, he would care about his teammates. But he doesn’t, so he’ll take four days off.
It will actually be eight days off, as the Blue Jays series is the last before the All-Star break, and Merrifield was not named to the American League All-Star team.
This makes sense: he’s not a winning player. None of these scientists in baseball pants are. (This is a uniquely American breed of stupidity: foreign-born players had to fight US entry requirements to play the season, so almost all of them are vaccinated.) Professional athletes have more resources than almost anyone on earth, but some of they cannot muster the energy to do enough research to reach the conclusion that every expert has: vaccines are safe and effective. They give us the best chance to contain a pandemic that has already killed a million Americans and changed the lives of millions more. And players who refuse to get those vaccines — in addition to contributing to the spread of this pandemic — risk ruining their clubs and extinguishing their teams’ playoff hopes.
Peter Aiken/USA Today Sports
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The best teams in baseball have figured this out. The Yankees (who are 61-26) are fully vaccinated. The Astro family (57–29) are fully vaccinated. The Dodgers (56–30) aren’t scheduled to play in Toronto during the regular season this year, so we don’t know the vaccination status of specific players, but they did reach the 85% vaccinated MLB threshold for reduced COVID restrictions last season . Catcher Kevin Plawecki of the Red Sox (47–41) told SI this spring that he would get vaccinated so he could be present for his team’s playoff push; center Jaren Duran told reporters this month he would do the same.
“I think if our team was in a different part of the standings, I think it would be different,” Royals (35-53) president of baseball operations Dayton Moore told SI on Wednesday night. He added: “It’s disappointing.”
The 10 ineligible players banned against the Blue Jays broke the previous record set by the Phillies by four. Moore argued that the number isn’t as disproportionate as it seems because the Royals haven’t manipulated it by picking up players or sending them to the injured list, as he said some other teams do. “That would be the easiest thing,” he said.
Still, it could have been worse — Moore said many Royals received shots after spring training. He declined to specify how many or when, but said team executives have spent two seasons encouraging players to get vaccinated. They made doctors available at all times to answer questions and sent staff from the University of Kansas Health System to vaccinate the players and their families at their homes.
“It’s the players’ choice,” he said. “At times it became – I wouldn’t say combative, but you get to a point where you don’t make much progress with it. … It’s been more difficult to convince players to get vaccinated in the last three to four months than it was in the first three to four months when the vaccine first came out.”
That leaves him with 10 players who would rather watch their team lose on TV than try to help it win. And indeed, he might be stuck with them — it’s hard to imagine a contender who might face the Blue Jays in the postseason targeting a player who won’t be eligible for those games. Red Sox team president Sam Kennedy told SI during spring training that vaccination status will affect acquisitions.
“You have to, don’t you?” he said. “You want guys who are available.”
You also want guys who want to win games.
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