Christian Player-Products, on sale now...and then

Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and realities of the game...The big league games are too fast for the beginner and the newspapers don't help. To read them with profit you have to know a language that comes easy only after philosophy has taught you to judge practice.

Jacques Barzun, 1954

I've gotten so disgusted with baseball, I don't follow it anymore. I just see the headlines and turn my head away in shame from what we have done with our most interesting game and best, healthiest pastime.... The commercialization is beyond anything that was ever thought of.... Other things are similarly commercialized and out of proportion. But for baseball, which is so intimately connected with the nation's spirit and tradition, it's a disaster.

Jacques Barzun, 2008

Although reading our blog might not require the same kind of philosophical training that Barzun deems necessary for comprehending the sports page, we're not exactly floating softballs here. In fact, this post will probably razzle and confuse all you Bible-thumpers out there. But frankly, in America, you're in the majority and atheists like me are in a minority, so buck up.

Before reluctantly endorsing some good-old mass-consumption of this year's MLB playoff product, there's another commodity which the Big Show churns out, year after year after year, whose linguistic practices urge this particular baseball-language philosopher to analyze, before turning to some truly Pagan themes in the next post.

Biblical allusions (illusions?), archetypes, and allegories still circulate within the sewers of speech that snake through American Sports rhetoric. And this bothers me to no end. Even in an age of supposed secularism, lessons of a most punitive Moral Order persist. Language of the straight and narrow steeped for over a century in holy water sterilizes the playful spirit. Humorless, conformist narratives manufacturing humorless, conformist disciples.

On the field, in the sports pages, and across the baseball blogosphere the unending barrage of Christian discourse continues to assault our humanist dispositions.

Major League Baseball has become a worldwide leader in the manufacture and distribution of several lines of commercialized Christian products. The most ubiquitous of all is the Christian Athlete, often seen grazing on the grounds of $400 million ballpark castles and cathedrals across the country.

North American professional baseball has manufactured this type of player-product since its inception over 150 years ago (Christy Matthewson, pitcher, was known as The Christian Gentleman exactly 100 years ago).

Sometimes the product features a sensationalized, lost-then-found backstory about redemption and success through Faith (everyone's favorite example: Josh Hamilton). Sometimes the player opportunistically dons the mask of the Christian Athlete, only to cast it aside backstage (e.g. Reggie Jackson). But most of the time, the Christian Athlete is presented as completely and utterly normal.

Very few, if any Americans felt their stomachs turn as I did after the stoic journeyman pitcher, Ryan Vogelsong, came out of the metaphysical closet in his post-game interview by immediately attributing his 7-inning gem to the benevolent willing of "God".

The predictability of this player-product is its primary draw -- a familiarity device engineered to please the majority of those who consume such a product. For this particular player-product, television is still the ideal medium in which to be marketed. The Christian Athlete is groomed for television by sports psychologists, personality coaches, and media trainers: shown how to act, told how to talk, and handled with care. This is the flagship model, the traditional standard by which other, improperly functional models are contrasted against.


Indeed, the relative few number of player-products which do not comform to standardization are usually just ignored and permitted to operate as an anomaly -- something that doesn't fit in, even in the eyes of the casual observer. For, these players display none of the rituals or gestures that accompany the Christian Athlete. Their ironic a-conformity is made featureless by the rhythms and grammar of superficial television broadcasts; potential ambiguity is made mundane, insubordination is labeled as juvenile or childish behavior, and all expressions of independent thought or attitude are suppressed by their superiors.

The Christian Athlete, on the other hand, is instructed to keep silent on all matters pertaining to politics, society, culture, and anything else outside of baseball. Like a politician on the campaign trail, they have sacrificed personality for the appearance of professionalism. They are driven by the fear of possibly offending some potential consumer, somewhere. Everyone is a potential consumer of this player-product and should any unconventional characteristics be revealed about the prototype, yeegads! - some people might not like it.

The rote mechanical way in which the player-product has been programmed to respond to questioning will, however, often include one or more references to their Faith. Utilizing Christian language in the context of sport is an easy way to link the twin passions of blind faith and fanaticism together, rendering the consumer more easily manipulatable. It also makes the story behind each player-product a fundamemtally simple, yet mythically powerful one. Watch as the player-product transforms into a silent warrior, driven onward and upward by his Faith and the promise of unfathomable financial gains.

And MLB continues to engineer and streamline what it sees as its most marketble asset, falling strictly in line with Christian consumer preferences.

But the player-product also happens to be an employee, a worker with constitutional rights. And their employers are bound by labor laws which explicitly prohibit preferential treatment or hiring practices toward one religious group over any other religious or non-religious group.

This is called discrimination. We've seen it before in baseball in more malicious, cruel, and segregating forms. Now, it's more subtle and benign.

But make no mistake about it: from the Christian rituals staged at the ballpark (so-called Faith Days at our publicly-financed stadiums), the redundant gesturing performed by player-products right on cue (pointing to the sky, crossing onesself after each televised hit ot homer), and the vocabularies employed in the way Baseball Men talk about their trade ("I'd just like to thank God for the opportunity..." "We feel blessed..." etc.) we can clearly see the homogenizing effects of the discourse of Christianity, thriving in the sewerage running through the discursive regime of American Baseball.

When Baseball finally reaps what hath been sowed by Christian normalization, led as it is by political and financial forces of Capital, it will once again find itself behind the times, clumsily out-of-step with progressive forces of society, lurching along stubbornly and always feeling itslef the victim of unfair persecution. 

("Fair!? What the fuck, 'Fair'? Who's the fuckin Nihilist around here!?")