et’s posit from the start what ought to be self-evident: There is no liberal or conservative way to defeat a deadly virus. Yet, if you’re loyal to the values of the Enlightenment—if reason and science and evidence light your way—then you ought to be very concerned about our age of alternative facts and dueling amen corners. And you ought to find it very difficult to be a Phillies fan right now.
If you haven’t heard, something like half of our baseball team is unvaccinated. Major League Baseball is willing to relax its Covid-19 safety protocols for those teams—defined as players and staff that travel with them—that are 85 percent vaccinated. The Phillies are nowhere near that number, and numerous players have already missed multiple games as a result.
Some, like pitcher Aaron Nola, proclaim the matter to be a “personal choice”; others do an almost too believable job of projecting ignorance: “I don’t know, I haven’t talked to the guys,” relief pitcher Hector Neris said. “It’s like, different opinions. Everybody is different.”
That’s the thing, though. This isn’t a matter of opinion. The facts are overwhelming; we’re in a pandemic of the unvaccinated. Not to hear our Phils tell it, though. It’s one thing for twentysomething ballplayers to make uninformed public pronouncements. But it is hugely disappointing to hear their adult manager do the same.
“I think it’s a personal decision that I will not get involved in because it’s a personal decision,” Girardi rather redundantly told the press when asked why he just doesn’t mandate that his players take the same vaccine he’s taken. “So whatever the player decides, I will back him no matter what.”
There are a number of ways to call out Girardi’s lack of moral leadership here. But let’s stick to the big picture. What’s so alarming about Girardi’s casual Swiss-like neutrality is that, because he’s an authority figure, it can fuel what is already so rampant in American culture: A doubling down on know-nothingism, and a war on the very notion of expertise.