How to burn your own chi

 

If you're like me, you DON'T watch sports because athletes remind you of politicians on their worst days.

Very much the opposite. Athletes come from an inherently, "no-excuses" culture, and usually they're very good at owning up to their own shortcomings—and (often too good at) saying what's on their mind. 

But Covid seems to make cowards of them all.

We saw it when Aaron Rodgers, formerly one of the most popular players in the NFL, hemmed and hawed and deliberately misled everybody regarding his vaccination status this past year.

I'm not saying there's karma in football. But somehow it did seem as if Rodgers' reduced credibility led directly to his pathetic playoff performance and—yet another—early exit for the Packers.

Then there is Aaron Judge, sounding as mealy mouthed as, well, our own mayor, in refusing to let on the other day as to whether or not he has been vaccinated...two years into this epidemic, and with the entire season for his team potentially on the line.

I don't want to get into the whole vaccine debate here. But it seems to me that the least we're owed by an athlete who we fans are currently enriching down to the seventh generation of the seventh generation, is a forthright explanation.  

Had the Other Aaron sat down before the media and said, outright, "Hey, I've checked this out, really looked into it, and I think that this vaccine (or any vaccine) is a greater danger to me and others than the Covid, and I'm willing to forego the money I would make by sitting out, if that's what it takes"—I would have respected that.

I would have thought, Man, you really need to get better sources. But I would have respected his decision.  

Instead, much like Green Bay's Mr. Fabulous, Aaron Judge, a man who so seemed to epitomize what is best about professional sports (and is so rarely on display these days) that not just your New York Yankees but MLB in general planned to make him the image of the game...managed to burn his own chi to a crisp.

No, I'm not actually a believer in Eastern philosophies. But I do like the idea of a "chi"—a sort of vital energy that is your real self, much as Plato thought of a real self. Or at least that's how my limited, baseball-polluted intellect conceives of it.

It doesn't mean that either Aaron will never have a good season again. But their actions do mean that something has been irrevocably lost in both men.  

I couldn't find it online for some reason, but the Daily News ran its own, brilliant cartoon today, of a massive, pinstriped figure who was obviously Judge, standing at the plate and pointing, Babe Ruth-like, toward the stands, as if to call his shot.

Instead, he is saying, "Look at that dummy up in the stands who went and got vaccinated."

It's true. In a town where garbage collectors and nurses are being fired for not being vaccinated, now the Aaron Judges, and the Jacob deGroms, and the Kyrie Irvings, have an exemption. No matter how you slice it, or what you think of Covid or vaccines, it's not right.

The related question of whether our Aaron should get a massive raise and extension of his contract is now on the table—a question that enabled F.S. Hal Steinbrenner to evade the question as to why he didn't fill any of his team's gaping holes this offseason.  

As a number of people here have pointed out, Judge, about to be 29, is most likely only to decline. As it is, he has never managed to bat above .287, and has missed an average of almost 33 games a year—a figure that would been more like 50 games a year, had baseball played a full season in 2020, when he would have had to miss the entire first half.  

I would say trade him. I have said trade him for several years now. But, with the Cashman Conundrum, you know and I know and the American people know that our balding, pudgy Boy Wonder of the front office will never get anything like comparable value for Judge.

But still: how are the next ten years going to go for what will be a constantly injured, constantly whiffing Aaron Judge—and the knowledge that he still get his hundreds of millions, while the people who served us everyday have had to go look for work?