News came out yesterday that Major League Baseball will require players participating in the Arizona Fall League to be vaccinated.
This is a new development in major American professional sports—so far, we’ve seen leagues go so far as to impose strict penalties on unvaccinated players who contract the coronavirus, but we’ve yet to see a vaccine mandate within the NFL, the NBA, the NHL, or Major League Baseball. Evidently vaccine mandates are something subject to collective bargaining, which combines with the absence of mandates to imply the players unions are opposed to such a measure. In the case of the Arizona Fall League, however, since it’s a minor league and minor league players aren’t part of the MLBPA, it’s open season for Major League Baseball, and the mandate is thus reportedly on its way.
The news provokes a telling corollary: Given Major League Baseball can mandate vaccines for minor leaguers, why hasn’t it already? Why is this limited to the Arizona Fall League? The answers for this are rather easy to assume: The vaccines weren’t widely available last winter when spring training preparations were being made. Vaccine hesitancy was more widespread, and with the vaccines newer, more understandable than it is now. A mandate didn’t make sense then, it makes sense now, and it will—and here’s where we’re going with this—make even more sense in January, when pitchers and catchers prepare to report to spring training once more.
We don’t know whether the players unions will change their stance on a mandate at the major league level. We don’t know whether a mandate will even be necessary, or if some sort of accepted stability with vaccination rate and immunity rate and hospitalization rate and death rate will have been reached. We don’t know if Major League Baseball will hold back from instituting a blanket mandate on the minors, given the Arizona Fall League—a special extra-season league for elite prospects—is marginally easier to opt out of than a core, full-season minor league (that said, opting out of the AFL would be self-sabotage career-wise). But this mandate does imply that MLB might be willing to institute a vaccine mandate for the totality of minor leaguers this offseason, and that would go a long way towards making 2022 the first year in three years in which games—both in the majors and the minors—don’t have to be canceled due to virus outbreaks in locker rooms.
Hopefully, it’s not even a question. Hopefully vaccine hesitancy wains as it becomes clearer and clearer how safe and effective these vaccines are. Hopefully the virus’s predominant strains fade in severity and/or communicability. But in the event this drags on—in the event we’re still working on stamping out or stamping down the virus for the next two, or three, or four years—the mandate might be coming. And with it, given players must pass through the minors to play in the major leagues, an indirect “grandfather” approach to the matter at the big-league level as well.
