Kent Bottenfield Croons To Save Your Soul

We remember former major league pitcher Kent Bottenfield as an above-average starter for the Cardinals and the guy we packaged with Bill Simmons lookalike Adam Kennedy to grab Jim Edmonds. (Also, he's the least likely human to be included in the Mitchell Report tomorrow.) Well, he's more than that now: He's a Christian music singer.

Supposedly he's a pretty good one too.

In Bottenfield's case, the itch to play music was present during much of his nine-year major league career. At one point, during the 1996 season, Bottenfield even began to bring his keyboard on the road with him. "Whenever baseball was not going so good, I couldn't wait to get back to my room to start playing and I started thinking that maybe I could do music someday," Bottenfield said. "But I felt like God was telling me, 'You know what Kent? I have you given you baseball right now. You need to set that music aside.' So I quit music completely and that's really when my career started taking off."

We love the mental image of Bottenfield getting together with Gary Gaetti and J.D. Drew, and irritating, say, teammates Brian Jordan and Fernando Tatis with their gospel keyboarding. Sometimes baseball locker rooms seem like the ideal social experiment.

Bottenfield: From All-Star To CCM Artist [BPSports]