Thanks for being so forthcoming and honest here. It also shows a lot of integrity.I suppose, but I don't see how this in any way disputes mt8thsw9th's point - people who cheer for Chapman are scumbags. Only you can decide if your love of the team outweighs how you could (or should?) feel about said team employing Chapman. As an NFL fan, I've grappled with this often and I don't have much to say to those who accurately say that I'm a scumbag for watching, and supporting, teams who actively hide the consequences of brain injuries. They're scumbags by any definition of the term, and so am I for watching.
Like a lot of things, you make you choice and deal with the consequences. If cheering for the Yankees is more important to you than the fact that you are are a scumbag for cheering Chapman, then you get to live with those (personal) consequences. If someone else wants to call the Yankees "a bunch of scumbags for employing Chapman"...well, you can't really argue, can you? I mean you can, but when you do you're a hypocrite, too, so probably best to just grit your teeth and hope for the Chapman era to end quickly.
I couldn't root for John Lackey in a Red Sox uniform. I thought what he did to his wife was awful, and combined with what else we knew about the person John Lackey, I could never "root" for him. I didn't attend Red Sox games, I watched far fewer - and never Lackey starts - and by the end of 2013, I was barely a Sox fan anymore. I'm glad the team finally got rid of the guy but my Red Sox fandom has absolutely decreased because the organization chose to employ a player I could not, in good conscience, root for. That's a personal choice. I don't think I've ever written about it here, and I definitely didn't tell fellow fans (very often) that they should also give up on the team, but I did what felt right to me.
Wingack, as a thoughful human being, has to make that choice for himself. Either way, Wingack will remain a good person, albeit one who has had to make a "cheer decision" based on more than laundry. Fandom gets more complicated when you grow up. It isn't all about the laundry anymore. For another, counter-example check out PK Subban, the Montreal Canadien who gave millions to finance a hospital. Or Didier Drogba, the soccer player who has built multiple hospitals in his home country. Who you choose to cheer for says something about you. If it's a team, and that team employs a scumbag, you're enabling that team/scumbag. If that's OK with you...terrific. It isn't OK to me (or mt8thsw9th) and the world will keep on spinning either way.
Fandom is a difficult thing, it was a different era, but are our older SoSH members and parents of SoSH members scumbags for rooting for the Red Sox while they were the last team to integrate? Were there people that didn't root for the team until the did integrate? I honestly don't know but it would be worthy hearing from some of our older members.
In a general sense, I am much less emotionally invested in cheering for the Yankees or any team like I did when I was a teenager, that is all part of me becoming an adult. And yeah, it is true that when you hear a good story about a player on a team you like you feel good about rooting for him. For example, just a few weeks ago Max Scherzer (on my second favorite team) gave The Salvation Army National Capital Area Command ten thousand dollars to help pay for gifts for kids that were stolen from the Salvation Army in DC just before Christmas, to help buy all new gifts. Class act. So yeah, I may cheer a little harder for him when he pitches and want to see him do even better than he already does.
But I am under no illusions that there are also scumbags on the Nationals (or more scumbags on the Yankees) that we just don't know about yet.