It’s a Chicago legend, nurtured like a hot dog with everything except ketchup. During the 1945 World Series, local bar owner William Sianis brought his pet goat, Murphy, to a game between the hometown Cubs and the Detroit Tigers. Murphy was denied entry, because he smelled. Thus began the Curse of the Billy Goat, dooming Chicago’s NL entry to decades of also-ran status. As Sianis reportedly wrote team owner Philip Knight Wrigley after the Tigers won in 1945, “Who smells now?” The Cubs would not win another title until 2016.
Welcome to the world of magic in baseball. On the macro level, a goat can apparently change the fortunes of an entire team; on the micro level, batters engage in elaborate rituals at the plate, and no one dares to say “no-hitter” until the final out. It’s a narrative that goes back to baseball’s 19th-century origins, and it’s all chronicled in a new book out this week – The Magical Game: The Spirit and History of Baseball’s Superstitions, Rituals, and Curses by author, journalist, astrologer and New York Mets fan Addy Baird.
While cheering on the Mets, Baird says, “I found myself becoming a very superstitious baseball fan. It’s part of what made me want to write the book. Probably predictably, I got extra superstitious when the Mets, for once, played great baseball for some stretches.” Trying to influence a win, she says, “I changed the way I acted, things I did, wore, watched, said, ate.”
Baird has plenty of company within the pages of the book. There are turn-of-the-century managers like Connie Mack of the Philadelphia Athletics and John McGraw of the New York Giants who relied on human mascots to bring their teams good luck. In the 1980s and 1990s, Wade Boggs famously ate chicken before every game. In this decade, a Seattle Mariners fan believes that when he held a pair of slippers in his hand, it somehow sunk his team’s fortunes. And when the Tampa Bay Rays struggle in the middle innings, music from Middle Earth soothes a Rays fan who otherwise has no interest in Lord of the Rings.
Those superstitions appear to have bled into softball. This week it was revealed that a top college player eats ladybugs in the dugout for good luck.
Then there’s the larger-than-life narratives surrounding baseball, its mythologies and curses. Baseball hushed up its British connections and created its own made-in-America origin story featuring Civil War general Abner Doubleday and a ballfield in Cooperstown, New York. Multiple Major League teams became associated with curses – not just the Cubs but also the Boston Red Sox, who notoriously sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees. Champions in 1918, the Sox did not win another World Series until 2004. Over that 86-year drought, they became known for agonizing near-misses, notably in 1986 against Baird’s Mets, losing Game 6 of the World Series on a ball that went through Bill Buckner’s legs.
Asked what it is about baseball that makes it more prone to magic than other sports, Baird had several answers: The presence of luck. The structure of the game. And its repetitive nature.
“Basically, when a sport has fewer instances of scoring, luck is a bigger factor,” she says. Structurally, she notes, “[baseball] is one of the only games we play, and the only major North American sport, where the defense has the ball. The offense has a crazy power imbalance. It creates a really uncertain environment.”
What’s another surefire way to spark superstitious practices, according to researchers? An atmosphere of constant repetition, such as each time a batter comes to the plate over a 162-game regular season.
“A batter maybe sees more than a dozen pitches every game,” Baird says. “There’s a split second from the ball leaving the pitcher’s hand [and going] over the plate for you to try and hit it … it compounds the elements of uncertainty and luck, a perfect environment for magic to thrive.”
Baird is a politics journalist who previously worked in Washington DC, where she covered including the impeachments of Donald Trump to the January 6 riots. Describing herself as burnt-out, she decided to leave her full-time job and write a book. A friend advised her to pick a subject she loved, as she would be spending all her time with it.
“What do I care about? What can I spend four years on?” she recalls thinking. “The answers, for me, were baseball and magic.
“I’ve always loved magic, astrology, tarot cards, spirituality, religion. I’ve been very interested since I was a kid.” Her passion for baseball and the Mets is more recent, dating back to a decade ago and “a magical game with my father.”
There was an unexpected element of magic regarding this article: A copy of the book mysteriously disappeared from a room in this reporter’s home on the morning of the interview. Later in the day, with an hour to spare before the call, the book mysteriously reappeared in a different room.
“No way!” Baird says when informed of this. “No way.” With a laugh, she adds, “This book is a magical object.”
The Magical Game contains nine chapters, reflecting the nine innings of a baseball game. Baird, a former archivist, delved into newspapers on microfilm at the Library of Congress and interviewed experts such as John Thorn, the official historian of Major League Baseball. The book backs up its findings on baseball with insights from seemingly unrelated fields like psychology and anthropology: Baird discusses Joseph Campbell’s concept of the hero’s journey, and Bronislaw Malinowski’s study of South Pacific island fishermen in the early 20th century.
“In the inner lagoons, [the fishermen] had no magic rituals,” Baird says of Malinowski’s findings. “In the open sea, where it was more dangerous, and the catch was more uncertain, there were a lot of magic rituals involved … What happens in baseball is uncertainty, prediction of failure, a high degree of luck.” When it comes to rituals in such an environment, she says, “the human brain is almost perfectly designed to latch on in this way.”
Meanwhile, MLB’s Thorn noted that “the form of the game itself mirrors that of the Odyssey,” Baird says. “It’s the hero’s journey: You start at home,” where you either “strike out – literally or figuratively,” or “go on a journey where the goal is to come home. It’s the story of the Odyssey. The story of this myth is embedded in the game itself. Magic is in its very structure.”
The book asks whether sabermetrics, and recent rule changes aimed at shortening games, have made the magic disappear in baseball. Baird has shifted her stance on this. In the summer of 2022, she pitched a book chapter on the death of magic in the national pastime. One year later, MLB debuted its pitch clock.
“I pitched the chapter, ‘baseball is dead, the magic is over, the league killed it by implementing new rules,’” Baird says. After doing more research, she had a realization: “I was entering a long tradition of people who had been saying this since the 1860s: ‘They don’t play baseball like they used to, baseball’s dying if not dead.” What she’s come to believe is that “the game should evolve, an unchanging thing is a dead thing.”
As for sabermetrics, Baird says, they “help us to see what makes [baseball] unique, what makes it special, what makes players exceptionally good … Those numbers reveal to us the magic.”
By the end of her book project, not only did she have a completed manuscript, but an additional career path. In addition to continuing with her journalism, now for the Deseret News, she has also become a practicing astrologer.
“It was one of my really interesting side quests,” Baird says, adding that now, “I do readings for people, reading charts.”
Whether you’re an Astros fan or an astrologer, a Cardinals enthusiast or a tarot card reader, the book has something for everyone.
“I always tell people, it’s a book for people who love baseball,” Baird says, “also for those who do not care about baseball at all.” And, she adds, “it’s a book for the people who love magic, looking at it through a lens they may never have considered before.”
