The Colorado Rockies baseball club is starting to downplay, just a little, their belief that they are God's chosen team.

With their out-of-nowhere winning streak, the Colorado Rockies are reminding us what sport can be at its best: exhilarating, uplifting, even inspiring. The Rockies enter the World Series tonight after 21 victories in their last 22 games.

One might even call such a streak miraculous, a description much of the team would happily accept. The Rockies have become known as the closest thing Major League Baseball has to a faith-based club. The front office runs the franchise based on what it describes as Christian principles, and it consciously recruits players judged to have "moral values" and "character."

"I think character-wise we're stronger than anyone in baseball," Chief Executive Charlie Monfort told USA Today in May 2006. "Christians, and what they've endured, are some of the strongest people in baseball. I believe God sends signs, and we're seeing those." Among them: a team refreshingly free of off-field misbehavior and a clubhouse where there are more Bibles than issues of Maxim.

Many religious baseball fans have embraced this formulation as well. "I think God's promise is that regardless of the outcome, he is with you," one Rockies supporter said. "But I also know that he has power to take seemingly hopeless situations -- a cancer patient being healed, a marriage restored or an average team winning 21 of 22 -- and intervene to make something very special happen so that people might recognize that something beyond just people was involved."

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So those looking to spread the good word may have chosen a dubious mouthpiece. There's also reason to question whether pro sports wants too-close an association with the evangelical stripe of Christianity that predominates in sports, one that emphasizes belief in Jesus Christ as the sole route to salvation. As Rockies General Manager Dan O'Dowd admitted to USA Today last year, the team was "nervous" about offending non-Christians. Since then, the organization has downplayed the Christian-team story line, and O'Dowd told Sports Illustrated recently that the Christian angle was overblown. "Many people in this organization have a ton of faith," he said, "and I'm certainly one of them. But it's not anything we talk about. Our focus is on getting players of good character."