Baseball, insofar as anyone thinks about it all, is perceived as fairly nonpartisan, which is as it should be. You could argue that baseball is institutionally liberal — the commissioner’s office, for instance, is slightly to the left of reparations advocates on affirmative action, and the game’s commitment to large-scale subsidies for public construction projects is positively Lindsay-esque — but that’s balanced out by the inherent conservatism of the game itself, and by the fact that almost any time you hear a player speak up about politics he’s proclaiming himself a Republican. Basically, and rightfully so, baseball is just baseball.

Major League Baseball puts some effort into fostering this impression. Its political action committee, according to records retrieved through opensecrets.org, contributed $169,883 during the last election cycle, and of that, 51% went to Democrats and 49% to Republicans. The PAC, funded by dues paid by MLB ownership, is one of the two main official arms of the game in Washington, the other being the lobbying firm of Baker & Hostetler, whose biggest client is MLB. And who, looking at that admirable balance of giving, could doubt that MLB is, unlike those industries that go into the bag for one or another party, dedicated to staying right in the creamy center of the partisan fray?

Interestingly, this isn’t at all true. MLB is aggressively Republican in its political giving. Insofar as political giving serves as a proxy for influence, this probably gives us a pretty good clue as to what MLB can expect when dealing, as it will this summer, with a Congress controlled by Democrats.

Tracing the political giving and political influence of MLB isn’t as easy as you might think. There are a few problems. Most obvious is that baseball teams are owned by rich businessmen with varied interests. Even if you’re the sort of person who thinks that a fat donation to Senator Take-a-bribe results in quid pro quo, it’s almost impossible to tell what quid goes with which quo — is the owner of the Shelbyville Shelvillians throwing around cash to ensure that team’s interests, or those of his diamond mine? A bit less obvious is that the most powerful baseball owners don’t give political donations as such. The Tribune Co. for instance, which owns the Chicago Cubs, doesn’t go around writing checks to anyone for anything, least of all on behalf of the baseball team it happens to own; does the absence of such donations mean the Tribune doesn’t have the ear of powerful players like Senator Obama, a Democrat of Illinois? Of course not. Moreover, not all donations on behalf of teams or their executives are labeled as such, which makes it difficult to draw up an accounting of donations.

That said, sifting through the imperfect information we do have can be instructive. I checked the donations made by everyone listed as an executive on the Web sites of each MLB team, everyone who listed himself as a team executive when filling out the paperwork that accompanies a political donation, and everyone who gave money to MLB’s PAC, to try to draw up a comprehensive picture of who’s giving the money and where it’s going. The main, unsurprising conclusion is that baseball, when voting with its wallet, votes Republican.

That being so, the biggest spenders in the game are the Baltimore Orioles, a team owned by Peter Angelos, a wealthy lawyer and major fund-raiser. Angelos and his son John shelled out $111,400 during the last election cycle to a variety of Democratic causes, exceeding by more than 10% the amount given by the staunchest Republican partisans, the Texas Rangers ($100,143) and the Arizona Diamondbacks ($99,700).

Beyond that, though, not many of the left-leaning teams are really anteing up, when compared with their conservative rivals. Five teams had left-leaning giving patterns — the Orioles, San Francisco Giants, Pittsburgh Pirates, Boston Red Sox, and the Chicago White Sox—and their collective donations, not including those made to MLB’s PAC, totaled $377,950. By contrast, nine teams gave significant amounts of money, each one registering a decidedly Republican tilt in its giving. Those teams (the Rangers, Diamondbacks, Colorado Rockies, St. Louis Cardinals, Cincinnati Reds, Houston Astros, Philadelphia Phillies, Oakland A’s, and the Yankees) shelled out $544,805 in total.

The same records show that the one team everyone can agree to support is the defending AL champion, the Detroit Tigers, who last cycle parted with not one thin dime in political contributions, so far as I could tell — not even to MLB’s PAC.

Perhaps more telling than the scope of industry wide contributions, though, are those made to individual politicos. Does baseball go for Rudy Giuliani or John McCain? Who is baseball’s favorite senator? And among the politicians who happen to sit on key committees, which happen to see contributions flowing in from baseball owners from California to the New York island? Check back in this space on Friday for the answers.

tmarchman@nysun.com