10 Royals sidelined for Toronto series due to vaccination requirements

When the Kansas City Royals traveled to Toronto this week, ten of their players could not follow — stopped not by injury or discipline, but by the quiet authority of a national border. Canada's vaccination requirements for entry, still in force, transformed a routine road series into a reckoning with the ongoing tension between personal medical choices and the obligations of professional life. The players who stayed behind did so by their own choosing, and they paid for that choice in wages, service time, and the particular silence of watching teammates board a plane without them.