"Keep the Designated Hitter Rule Pornographers Away from Baseball!"

"Keep Pornographers away from Major League Baseball!"

That's the lastest rallying cry from Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council (alas, not that Tony Perkins, whose second big role was playing psycho big leaguer Jimmy Piersall in Fear Strikes Out [which, incidentally, should have been accurately titled Fear Draws an Intentional Walk).

Personally--and I say this as someone who has copped to maintaining and Eddie Murray stats-and-sideburns shrine as a kid--I think baseball would have long benefited from closer ties to the porn industry--just imagine the possibilities for mascots such as Chief KnockaHomer and the prehensile-tongue-wielding Phillie Fanatic, not to mention former journeymen such as Dick Pole and Pete LaCock. And let's face it, scandal-clouded Viagra pitchman and Hall of Fame stat machine Rafael Palmeiro's future clearly ain't in baseball these days.

But FRC's Mr. Perkins is spittin' more than Gaylord Perry because…because…well, let him tell you, in an open letter to baseball commish Bud Selig:

I have learned of reports that the Atlanta Braves may soon be sold to Mr. John Malone and Liberty Media. If approved, this purchase would effectively put Major League Baseball into a business partnership with one of America's most prolific purveyors of pornography. Through his ownership of ON COMMAND and his role in the cable company TCI, Mr. Malone has done as much as or more than any other American to mainstream the distribution of degrading porn into the nation's homes and into hundreds of thousands of hotel rooms. Pornography is not a harmless pursuit, but rather an industry that has been shown to play an enormously destructive role in the lives of families, with particular impact on women and children.

Whole thing here.

Really, don't the Braves--not to mention hotel-room-renting porn watchers--have enough problems these days? And isn't there a war on, partly precisely because we are porn-lovin' infidel dogs?