Aaron and I are fans of the Red Wings and Tigers, so imagine our vexation last Saturday. Both teams were playing on television at the same time. My father is with us. He’s not into hockey. He wanted us to stick with the baseball game in Camden Yards. Aaron and I preferred the first game of the Stanley Cup Finals from Joe Louis Arena. We figured that behind their ace Justin Verlander, the Tigers would end the O’s five-game win streak. They did, 6 – 3.

I enjoy the story my father tells of the time a Latino player stepped into the batter’s box and crossed himself, as ball players are wont to do, and the Yankees’ catcher Yogi Berra tapped the guy’s knee with his mitt and said to him, “Whaddya say we just let God watch this game!”

That story has to do with why I don’t want my children to have values. That and some notes written by a soldier in a foxhole. Let me explain.

During World War I, a young Austrian soldier — an aristocratic Jew who was said to have fought with “reckless bravery” — used his time in a foxhole and in prison to jot down his thoughts on logic and ethics. After the defeat of Germany and Austria, these thoughts were published as Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, an almost impenetrably complex landmark work on the relationship between language and thought. The soldier’s name was Ludwig Wittgenstein. He published only this single book in his lifetime.

He was an intellectual high-watt bulb, Wittgenstein, especially on the subject of “language games.” We play games, he observed. So do languages. When we reach for words, especially technical words, to apprehend and articulate reality, we do well to note what language game they belong to.

The language of values, like the language of ‘fastballs’ ‘bunts’ and ‘sacrifice flies’, belongs to a game with its own grammar or rules. Whereas values assume a closed system — more about which in a moment — baseball assumes an open one. Baseball’s played in a paradise whose only canopy is the heavens. This is the world a baseball player inhabits and late-night talk show hosts do not. The baseball player thanks God, or the Big Guy Upstairs, for his success. The late show hosts, Leno O’Brien or Letterman, make him the butt of jokes for it. As if God cares, they say. As if God has any interest in a game.

Athletes make easy targets. They want to believe — they believe inveterately — that God cares about what they’re doing and wishes them well, a notion quaint these days. Such a thought is incongruous in a world where our lives entire, not merely our sporting lives, are no longer seriously imagined as beheld by divinity. The reason we doubt God watches baseball is not that we think sport trivial but that we think God is. We lack the moral imagination the ancients had, or John Donne or Jane Austen. Most of us who have fiber-optic TV and 457 channels no longer imagine God watches anything. We are Nietzsche’s “last man.”

It was Nietzsche who made this values language up. He argued that whatever the rules of the game concerning our behavior shall be, they can only be rules we make up or choose for ourselves. A nihilist, he defined reality in terms of negation, negating that particular and strange history of the Jews. No more “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt” and the Ten Commandments and so on. The ancient Hebrew and Christian notion that the grammar of our lives is in league with a particular history involving Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Hannah, and David; the claim that our story is somehow part of the story of Israel and her children; the hope that we inhabit that story and are headed somewhere, all this belonged to another day. That day, Nietzsche said, and his values language assumes, is gone.

This is the language game of values, a language that presupposes God is not watching us any longer because there is no God to do the watching.

If values are what people are supposed to have instead of God — and I’ve just made the case that they are — why would I want my kids to have them? I’d rather they have virtues, especially those with narrative entailments. I’d rather they have the ancient sense that their lives are beheld by divinity, watched and worried after by the God of the Exodus and Mt. Sinai, the Lord who hung the stars in the heavens and raised Jesus from the dead. I want my children to live in a universe that is more like Camden Yards or Comerica Park than Mellon Arena or the venerable Joe. And I want the Wings to win the Cup.