Chansky's Notebook: To Vax Or Not To Vax

I guess winning is more important than getting vaxxed.

Former Wake Forest and ACC baseball star Whit Merrifield has refused to get vaccinated all season while playing for the lowly Kansas City Royals.

He apparently wanted to get into the postseason so badly that he reversed his commitment to family and whatever reasons he refused to get vaccinated along with nine teammates.

Merrifield was traded to the contending Toronto Blue Jays on Tuesday after he apparently told his new team he would get vaccinated so he could play games in Toronto, where athletes are banned from professional sports without the shots.

A debate has raged for most of the baseball season among teams that have unvaccinated players, questioning their loyalty to team vs. whatever reasons they did not get the vaccine.

There are family reasons, medical reasons and even religious reasons that keep people from getting vaccinated, and many businesses do not allow employees to continue working without it due to the chance they could infect others.

But you really can’t have it both ways. Even though the Royals are languishing in last place in their division, many of their fans cared enough to boo Merrifield and his teammates when they came back to Kansas City after not making the trip to Toronto earlier in the season with the rest of the team.

Now Merrifield will get booed again whenever he does return to KC with his new team. People have the right to get vaccinated or not, but it looks bad when they reverse course for what appears to be selfish reasons. To me, it seems disingenuous.

Or maybe they have changed their mind for other reasons. They could have finished their so-called personal research or they could have looked at the data about how many people who get infected these days are also not vaccinated.

I was a Merrifield fan when he was in college and through his Major League career before the pandemic. Now not so much, because he did not get vaccinated and it may have gotten into his head with his worst season ever as a professional.

If he gets vaxxed and helps the Blue Jays make it into the playoffs, then he will look like even more of a hypocrite. Too bad on all counts.

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Chansky’s Notebook: To Vax Or Not To Vax

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