During the all-too brief Royals playoff run I was writing about baseball pretty much every day (which cost me a reader because it was just “too much baseball” so thanks a lot all you baseball fans who encouraged me to do it) and in my enthusiasm for our National Pastime, foolishly semi-promised to write about baseball superstitions and a couple people responded to the idea enthusiastically so here it is and I’ll let you know how many readers this article costs me.
Anyway…
Baseball players are notoriously superstitious and here’s the theory behind it:
In baseball things are happening in fractions of a second and any deviation from your normal swing or pitching mechanics – a deviation you might not be aware of – can throw things off.
Now you’re hanging sliders and fouling off hittable pitches.
So you’re trying to keep your swing and/or pitching mechanics exactly the same so maybe if you do everything else exactly the same – your drive to the ballpark, your pregame meal, the way you put on your uniform – your swing and/or pitching mechanics will also be consistent.
That’s when you’re going good.
When you’re going bad you might not know why you’re going bad so you do the opposite: you change everything – your drive to the ballpark, your pregame meal, the way you put on your uniform.
If you chew gum, switch brands. If your bat isn’t getting hits, borrow a teammate’s. If wearing your pants down low to your shoe tops isn’t working, start wearing them high.
Now here’s the scene from Bull Durham where Crash Davis explains to Annie Savoy why her current boyfriend, Nuke LaLoosh, won’t have sex with her:
OK, so that’s the reasoning behind many of the baseball superstitions we’re going to talk about and we’ll start with…
Alex Gordon’s Footprints
Alex Gordon was famous for his nearly OCD-pregame rituals and when guys are going good they’ll take the same number of swings in the on-deck circle and put the same batting weights on their bat the same way and one night I was looking down from the press box and saw two white footprints on the grass just outside the Royals dugout.
The next day I asked groundskeeper Trevor Vance what was up with that and Trevor said that’s where Alex stands before he hits.
Standing in the same place over and over killed the grass and when Alex was asked if he could change things up and stand in some different places, Alex said he couldn’t so every once in a while the grounds crew cut out that piece of sod and replaced it with a new one.
Interesting side note:
During that same conversation Trevor told me to pay attention to the grass between home plate and the pitching mound and the grass between the dugout and the pitching mound because the worse a team played the more trips to the mound they’d make and they’d wear a path to the mound, so dead grass in those areas was a sign of a bad team.
But these days they change pitchers at the drop of a hat so now maybe dead grass is a sign of a team that’s actually being managed by the analytics department.
And those dropped hats remind me: ballplayers sweat a lot and get new hats several times a year, but Gordon would not change his and the guys lockering next to him complained that by the end of the season the smell of Gordo’s sweaty skanky nasty hat was getting to them.
Mike Aviles and His Batting Gloves
Major League ballplayers are given all kinds of equipment and Mike Aviles had a box of batting gloves supplied by the batting gloves’ manufacturer and when I commented on how many batting gloves Mike had versus how many he actually needed, Mike said:
“Each pair gets a CG.”
Mike would wear a pair of batting gloves for a Complete Game and if he got a hit those batting gloves would be worn the next day, but if he didn’t get a hit, the gloves were clearly defective.
It’s hard to stay confident when the best hitters in the game fail 70% of the time, so it’s not uncommon to blame your equipment – “That bat doesn’t have any hits in it” – and changing equipment gives a player a fresh start mentally; yesterday’s batting gloves were useless because the factory forgot to put some hits in them, but these new batting gloves are just the ticket and now that I’ve finally got the right batting gloves, I’ll get some hits.
Jason Kendall and His Batting Glove (singular)
Jason Kendall was an old-school ballplayer and didn’t wear batting gloves while hitting, but did wear one on his catching hand and being a catcher it would get soaked with sweat. If his starting pitcher had a good game, Jason had to wear the same soaking wet, clammy, cold batting glove the next day to give the next day’s starting pitcher a chance at having another good day.
Jason once said ball players are so superstitious it’s annoying and it’s a bunch of grown men acting like stupid kids, but if he’s 0-fer 26 he’s still borrowing somebody else’s bat.
Don’t Touch Their Equipment
If you ever get to visit a dugout and see a player’s glove or bat lying around, for God’s Sake don’t touch it – and I’ve seen plenty of non-baseball people make that mistake – because if baseball equipment has magical properties your un-athletic cooties just contaminated that equipment and a ballplayer will blow his stack if he sees you do it.
And for Double God’s Sake never, ever, never put your hand inside a ballplayer’s glove because gloves take a lot of time to break in so players can’t just suddenly switch gloves even though you just hexed their “gamer.”
You put your lousy uncoordinated hand inside a ballplayer’s glove and now he thinks he’s going to make an error and odds actually increase that he will make an error because you’ve got him thinking about making an error and if that happens he’s going to blame you.
Same goes for touching a bat and – being a dick, but a very funny dick – Jason Kendall would smear his batting practice bat with gobs of pine tar so anybody that touched it would spend the rest of the game trying to get that crap off their hands.
Even if you don’t believe in superstitions, the ballplayers do and – by the way – it’s not your stuff.
Wade Davis and the Pregame Conversations
One of the many, many, many baseball superstitions is you don’t talk to the starting pitcher before a game because who knows how that conversation might affect him and you mention owning a dog and he remembers he had a dog get run over when he was a kid and now he’s depressed and thinking about that unlucky dog and hangs a slider to Miguel Cabrera and Miggy hits it 450 feet and it’s clearly your fault for talking about your damn dog.
And since you don’t know what might put a starting pitcher off his game you don’t talk to him at all.
But when Wade Davis was a starting pitcher he didn’t believe in the superstition and since nobody else would talk to him and we had a good relationship, he’d sometimes seek me out before games so we could talk, which — to be honest — made me nervous as hell.
Because even though Wade was the one initiating the conversations, if he had a bad game, I’d still get blamed.
On the other hand, maybe I should get credit for those conversations because Wade’s ERA as a starter was 4.57 and his ERA as a reliever was 3.25 so if those pregame conversations jinxed his starts and got him sent to the bullpen which turned him into one of the best relievers in baseball, you’re welcome.
BTW:
I just remembered reliever Greg Holland making fun of starting pitchers and their pre-game superstition when he said in a very whiney voice:
“You talked to me and now I can’t throw strikes.”
Eric Hosmer and the Hot Streak
So clearly you need to be careful around ballplayers and I once made the mistake of mentioning a hot streak Eric Hosmer was having and Eric said he couldn’t believe I’d say that to him:
“I can’t even look at you right now.”
Because mentioning the hot streak made Hosmer think about the hot streak and he also didn’t like to talk about hitting mechanics because talking about them would make him think about them and then his swing wouldn’t be natural and fluid and it would all be my fault.
After I screwed up and mentioned his hot streak, Hos spent the next few minutes giving himself a pep talk:
“I’m better than this…I won’t let this screw me up at the plate…maybe Lee will get hit by a bus tomorrow.”
(OK, he didn’t actually say that last thing, but I’m pretty sure he was thinking it.)
A Visitor’s Winning Percentage
As you may have noticed ballplayers and coaches don’t mind looking for scapegoats and if you show up and they go on a losing streak it’s clearly your fault and I once had the Colorado Rockies clubhouse manager blame me for a losing streak that occurred after I showed up to visit Clint Hurdle.
When Clint asked if one of the clubhouse kids could give me a ride to the airport the clubhouse manager said yes and added we better hurry because:
“We need to get this fucking jinx’s feet off the ground.”
Apparently my unlucky feet were contaminating the entire state of Colorado and until I was airborne the Rockies had no chance of winning a ballgame.
But it can also work the other way and when I visited the Tidewater Tides in Toledo for a series with the Mudhens and Tides won four straight, the entire team wanted me to get on the bus and go to the next city with them.
An offer I foolishly turned down and I can’t imagine what I thought would be more fun than that bus trip with a bunch of happy ballplayers, buuuuut….if they lost the first game in the next city then my lucky streak was over and I’d have had to find my own way home.
The point being…
People who aren’t ballplayers, but hang around teams often know their winning percentage (how often the team won with them in attendance) and will quote it if it makes them look like a good luck charm.
Today’s Lesson
When you’re going good you don’t change anything and when you’re going bad you change everything and earlier this week I mentioned getting a summons for jury duty and I GOT PICKED for the jury and just spent three days trying to stay awake in a courtroom and not pop off with some one-liner that would cause a mistrial (and, trust me, I thought of a lot of them) so next week I’m going to start drawing cartoons left-handed.
I’m sure that’ll fix everything.
Just ask a ballplayer.
Read this whole thing with a smile on my face.
L
Sorry about the (surname) jury jinx...
mea culpa!