A ninth member of the New York Yankees organization has tested positive for COVID, manager Aaron Boone reported Sunday. The member was not identified. Every player and employee of the team had the Johnson & Johnson vaccine at least two weeks ago.
Shortstop Gleyber Torres is the only player among the nine members of the Yankee organization to test positive. The rest include first-base coach Reggie Willits, pitching coach Matthew Blake, third-base coach Phil Nevin, and five staff members. Torres tested positive in December after being vaccinated. He has since tested negative.
Boone said the unidentified staffer “feels good” and seven of the others were asymptomatic. Coach Nevin was the only one of the nine to show symptoms and was reported to be feeling better by Yankees’ vice president of communications Jason Zillo.
Good news?
“This is the vaccine working,” CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday. “This means that you didn’t get infected, or you didn’t get a severe infection, you didn’t require hospitalization, you didn’t require death, and most likely those people were not transmitting to other people. So that is what we were working on the vaccine doing, we were hoping it would do.”
Require death?
She also said the infections were detected during routine checks made by Major League Baseball, and that the Yankees and the CDC were working together to better understand the outbreak of vaccinated Yankees testing positive. Walensky said getting vaccinated lessens the likelihood of transmission to others, despite the fact that nine vaccinated Yankees have thus far tested positive.
All members of the Yankees received the single-shot J&J vaccine, which was found to be 72% effective against moderate COVID cases and 85% effective in severe COVID cases.
COVID is yet another thorn in the side of MLB. Baseball games have been rescheduled in the past because of positive COVID tests among teams. MLB games have seen a drop in viewership since the MLB decided to move the All-Star game out of Atlanta to protest Georgia’s new voter I.D. laws. This recent loss of interest in baseball comes after an all-but-gutted 2020 season, where fans were not allowed in baseball stadiums for a full year. They were replaced by cardboard cut-outs of people and canned cheers that made watching a game on TV sad and a little creepy. The 2020 World Series had a 20-year viewership low. As if COVID hadn’t hurt baseball enough, the plague of “political correctness” is taking its toll as well. It’s requiring the death of baseball.
A recent poll showed that 34.5% of fans are walking away from sports because of the “woke” culture. Nearly 60 percent of Republicans are watching less sports, as are 38.6% of Independents and 18% of Democrats. It’s enough to make me want to watch communist football or, as some call it, soccer.
With the numbers hurting, one would think MLB wouldn’t cut its own throat playing the “woke” card. My gut tells me that the 1% of blue-haired antifa brats they are catering to don’t spend money going to games or buying jerseys. Stop catering to the kids who, desperate to make a point, order their coffee “oppressed” instead of black (who am I kidding? The woke Seattle crowd probably loads their Marionberry flavored coffee with gluten-free Cinnabun sweetener).
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