I’m not a fan of baseball and I never have been. I have, however, always enjoyed much of the lore surrounding the sport – especially the tawdry bits.From the Black Sox incident to the more modern sideshow of steroid-supplemented sluggers breaking long-revered league records, baseball’s story is peppered with both scandal and scoundrel.

Baseball, warts and all, is the quintessential American game. The game’s blemishes, in fact, only augment its claim to being America’s Game. As with many American institutions, like Congress, fast food, and reality television, half the fun of baseball derives from its sordid underbelly.

I know not everyone is entertained by (and a deluded few will not even acknowledge) baseball’s checkered past and troubled present, so I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised to read last week that Liberty Media’s bid to purchase the Atlanta Braves is being opposed by a handful of “family values” groups.

Why do Focus on the Family, Concerned Women for America, and the Georgia Family Council oppose Liberty’s bid to acquire the Braves? Well, because Liberty is involved in the sale of that infamous destroyer-of-families pornography, of course.

More accurately, Liberty Media owns On Command, which in turn provides video-on-demand services to hotels, including adult videos.

By the leapfrog logic employed by Stephen Adams, the associate editor of Focus on the Family publication Citizen, the above chain of facts makes chief executive of Liberty Media John Malone the country’s biggest “white-collar pornographer.”

I’m not entirely sure what the alternative to being a “white-collar” pornographer is, but what Adams apparently means by the term is “clandestine” pornographer, or “closet” pornographer.

Adams’ greater concern, though, is for the slippery slope that selling to Liberty could create.

“If this happens,” Adams asks, “what’s to stop them from selling a team to Larry Flynt?”

The answer, Mr. Adams, ought to be “absolutely nothing”.

If Larry Flynt has both the capital and the inclination to purchase a professional sports franchise and some current owner and his corresponding professional sports league is willing to sell such a franchise to Larry Flynt, then Larry Flynt should be allowed to purchase any sports franchise he wishes.

“This is baseball and apple pie and America,” Adams whined to the Associated Press last week, complaining that his group and their associates would prefer to keep the cherished American pastime free of porn’s taint.

Guess what? For the Braves franchise, under by the definition of “pornographer” subscribed to by Adams and his ilk, it is too late; the franchise is already owned by a “pornographer.” The Braves are owned by Time Warner, a company that sells VOD porn through its mammoth cable television business.

Don’t trouble Adams with little facts like that, though. In his mind, what Time Warner’s sale of the Braves presents is the opportunity to get away from porn moguls among the team’s ownership.

“The owners need to go into this with their eyes wide open,” Adams said. “We would prefer that the Atlanta Braves or no team be owned by any pornographer, whether it’s Time Warner’s questionable business activity or John Malone’s questionable business activity.”

If Adams and other like-minded observers want to rid themselves of “questionable business activity” among the league’s owners, they have their work cut out for them.

The Toronto Blue Jays, for example, are owned by Canada’s Rogers Communications, parent company to Rogers Cable. Rogers offers not only Playboy TV (only $14.95 a month!) but the AOV Adult Movie Channel, the “XXX Action Clips Channel,” the Maleflixxx Channel, Red Light District TV and – brace yourself, Mr. Adams – a Hustler channel!

That’s right – the Toronto Blue Jays are already in bed, albeit rather indirectly, with the same man Adams doesn’t ever want to see as a franchise owner in the MLB.

I’m sure Adams will also be distressed to learn that the Tribune Company, owner of the Chicago Cubs, in turn owns Tribune Entertainment, the company that owns the distribution rights to South Park – a fine family program, I’m sure Adams would agree.

Yes, Mr. Adams, this is indeed baseball, this is apple pie, and most importantly, this is America; and in America, businessmen are permitted to conduct more than one type of business, even those types of business which involve the sale of pornography.

In the end, I suspect that Adams doesn’t really much care about baseball’s image or the as-yet-unclear way in which an owner’s other business interests might impact the game or its fans. Rather, I think Adams has simply spotted another opportunity to take a shot at an industry and some individuals that he doesn’t approve of and to further protest the “mainstreaming” of pornography in American culture.

What Adams and his peers ignore is that porn is every bit as American as baseball. While porn may be more “acceptable” in any number of other countries than it is in the U.S., no other country rivals America in the production, distribution, sale, and consumption of porn.

Why shouldn’t pornographers work their way into the always rich, occasionally lurid narrative that is the history of America’s Game?

After all, how could Larry Flynt possibly be a bigger embarrassment to the game than was Marge Schott?