Major League Baseball should be grooming kids … to play baseball. Instead, 29 MLB franchises hosted “Pride Night” events this year (the Texas Rangers being the lone, er, rangers). Worse, at least 20 teams more specifically caved to the Rainbow Mafia groomers, who use just about every single facet of American life to recruit the next generation of gender-benders and deniers — i.e., the “transgendered.”

With Little League participation declining in recent years due to stiffer competition from other sports, America’s Pastime has increasingly taken a backseat to other major sports. Yet baseball has long been the most culturally conservative of the major sports, if you will, with a larger percentage of Republican fans than the NFL or NBA. In fact, says Nate Hochman, “five MLB teams — the Texas Rangers, Atlanta Braves, Houston Astros, St. Louis Cardinals, and Colorado Rockies — have a larger share of Republican fans than Democratic fans, as opposed to just one NFL team (the Tennessee Titans) and zero NBA teams with that distinction.”

That warms the cockles of this lifelong Cardinals fan’s heart.

But it also makes reality that much more painful: The Cards are among the teams hosting some form of “Pride Night” in which “a portion of each ticket sold” goes to pay tribute to the Rainbow Mafia in the team’s city. Sometimes that means paying for, in some way, “transitioning” the sex of children.

That would be grooming kids.

Various of these Mafia recipients pride themselves on promoting sexual deviancy among youth. That includes everything from drag-queen shows (sometimes during pregame festivities) and backing “transgender” athletes to “gender-affirming care,” which means puberty blockers, hormone manipulation, and sometimes gender-destroying butchery.

That even pre-pubescent children are the targets of medical hacks who see a lot of money to be made in creating lifelong patients is unbelievably outrageous and disgraceful. It’s a tragic commentary on our culture, however, that the Rainbow Mafia is so powerful that even major sports teams are choosing to bow and pay tribute rather than stand against the inevitable destructive hate that would follow opposition to such horrors. Ask the handful of Tampa Bay Rays players how it went when they simply declined to wear a rainbow patch.

MLB has been more free of politics than the NFL or NBA, where national anthem protests and Black Lives Matter virtue signaling in particular gained traction. But MLB is far from innocent, as evidenced by last year’s removal of the All-Star Game from Atlanta to protest Georgia’s law bolstering election integrity. With a more conservative fanbase and the declining popularity of baseball generally, one wonders what kind of business sense MLB executives really have.

As commentator Dennis Prager is fond of saying, “Everything the Left touches it ruins.” Conservatives and independents should send a clear message to MLB and any other sports institution, through boycotts if necessary: Sports are for athletic competition and good-natured rivalry. Pet political causes — especially those that literally endanger the lives of children — have no place in sports. Grooming and butchering kids to advance sexual deviancy has no place anywhere.