The Chris Moeller Archives

The first openly-gay Cardinal? (No, not the Catholic kind)

A seismic shift in sports took place just before my vacation to New Orleans commenced, and I want to say this a week later about homosexuality, team sports, and the locker room. This issue of “dividing a club” is nothing new. I’m thinking specifically of evangelical Christian athletes and coaches who wear their love for Jesus Christ like a Bill Cosby sweater.

A St. Louis-based sports author, Rob Rains, recently coaxed 18 Cardinals baseball players and prospects, including their field manager, to talk for publication about their religious beliefs. The publishing of this book did not make national news. In that vein, Christian Family Day is an annual event at Busch Stadium following a Saturday home game each summer that offers up, to fans that wish to wait around for it, a very specific, evangelical, almost revivalist form of Christianity. Players and club employees actively take part, several of them as keynote speakers. It gets little media attention.

Members of the Cardinals team, and their bosses, have been completely silent thus far, publicly, on the issue of homosexuality in their business, but the widespread opposition to homosexuality among evangelicals nationally would seem to imply that, without their confirmed vocal contradiction, a homosexual teammate could very well be a distraction for this team’s clubhouse.

I wonder if the Cardinals’ manager, Mike Matheny, who offers himself up in the book as a Christian “who won’t shove (his beliefs) down your throat,” but who admits also to living in his faith every moment of his life, would be welcoming to a gay player under his leadership that lived his life openly as a gay man, even if the topic of the player’s sexuality was never broached in the locker room. This is Matheny's prerogative to live his religious faith openly-- and it’s also his luxury, as it's hard to imagine that any time soon a group of gay Cardinals would hold a daily fellowship meeting in the locker room the way that a group of Cardinals has been meeting daily for years for devotion and prayer.

Would the Cardinals sign a free agent player that was out of the closet? A week ago, I would have said no. The team has been subtly marketing itself to church and “family”-centered groups for so long that I was absolutely sure they would be frightened of scaring off this loyal base of fans with an action like this. But coming into possession of an unknown fact, I’m no longer sure. Tomorrow night, the Cardinals begin a 10-game home stand against the Colorado Rockies, and they do so with Andy Cohen Night at Busch Stadium.

Cohen, if you’re not familiar, is a television personality on the Bravo television network. He is the development brain behind series such as “The Real Housewives” franchise, Project Runway, and Top Chef. He is a St. Louis native that conducts his late-night talk program, “Watch What Happens Live,” on Bravo each night with a Cardinals cap resting on a book shelf over his right shoulder. He is also an openly-gay man. This is a high-profile honor at the ballpark to be sure. Despite promoting the Cardinals in similar fashion on television interviews, star of Mad Men and films, Jon Hamm, for example, has not had a night in his honor (yet) at Busch Stadium. Andy Cohen bobbleheads will be distributed to fans at Friday’s game, and the man himself will be on hand to sign autographs and throw out the ceremonial first pitch of the game. If gay bobbleheads are here, can a gay player be to far behind?

Baseball is a business, first and foremost, and the good news in this regard is that gay acceptance is already being proven to be good for business for other corporate entities outside of baseball. As for gay players, research shows that, in any business team environment, it is goal-cohesion, and not social-cohesion, that is the key ingredient for success by the group. If a gay player shares the same team goal of success on the field, and there are problems with this player being socially-accepted by his teammates, the studies say this is actually a non-issue in terms of group performance. You will never have universal acceptance for these men in the locker room and in the grandstands, but that’s the sad nature of prejudice-- it's stubbornly persistent. There are people out there who still probably believe that Jackie Robinson fucked up the Dodgers.

We’ve learned from the repeal of the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy that openly-gay group members only cause a “distraction” when straight members fail or refuse to come to grips with it. The Duke Ellington Orchestra, which was not unlike a barnstorming Negro League baseball team in its day, was integrated with an openly-gay member for a quarter-century beginning in the late 1930s. I'm speaking here of the brilliant composer Billy Strayhorn. That team didn’t seem to suffer. And are you actually going to make the claim that your baseball team will be more successful in its field than the Duke Ellington Orchestra? Fat chance, bub.

I truly believe that when an active Major League Baseball player comes out for the first time, we will see and hear something like this-- a handful of radio and cable TV bloviators clumsily spouting off (similar to Tim Brando last week), some isolated public criticism, and a case or two of religious-based moralizing from baseball people, but these comments will be tempered, or disguised at least in “well-meaning” “love the sinner”-type language. (It’s already and quickly becoming publicly verboten to be considered “homophobic” in the same way that even hard core racists now blanch at the label of “racist.”) And even these tempered comments will quickly dissipate when we find out that the sport did not implode upon its first outing of a current player. And then the storm will have passed, and we’ll be talking about who will be the gay Larry Doby. Baseball always survives-- and even thrives. And why shouldn't it? We're always told that, for the players, it's a game of adjustments.

posted by CM @ 5:50 PM