In 1945, a Chicago bar owner walked his pet goat to a Cubs game at Wrigley Field. The animal was turned away at the gate because of its smell. That rejection spawned the Curse of the Billy Goat, a hex that would plague the Cubs for 71 years before they finally won the World Series in 2016. It is a story so embedded in baseball lore that it survives not because it is provable, but because it feels inevitable: a team's entire destiny altered by a single, petty slight.
This collision of superstition and sport sits at the heart of a new book by journalist and astrologer Addy Baird. "The Magical Game: The Spirit and History of Baseball's Superstitions, Rituals, and Curses" explores how magic and ritual have become woven into the fabric of America's pastime since its 19th-century origins.
Baird, who spent the last decade covering Washington politics for major outlets including the impeachments of Donald Trump and the January 6 riots, found herself burned out by the work. She stepped back from full-time journalism to pursue a subject that had consumed her thinking: baseball superstitions and the rituals that players, fans, and teams employ to influence outcomes.
Her path to writing the book began with fandom. As a Mets supporter, Baird discovered she had become increasingly superstitious. When the team showed promise, she began changing her behavior in elaborate ways. "I changed the way I acted, things I did, wore, watched, said, ate," she said. The impulse felt irresistible, almost involuntary.
The superstitions she documents span generations and scales. Turn-of-the-century managers Connie Mack and John McGraw both relied on human mascots for good luck. Wade Boggs ate chicken before every single game during his playing years in the 1980s and 1990s. In recent years, a Seattle Mariners fan discovered that holding slippers seemed to doom his team's fortunes. A Tampa Bay Rays supporter plays music from "The Lord of the Rings" to steady the team through difficult middle innings.
The superstitions have even bled into college softball, where a top player reportedly eats ladybugs in the dugout for luck.
But why does baseball, more than any other sport, seem to invite this magical thinking? Baird points to three structural factors.
First is luck itself. Baseball scores infrequently compared to football or basketball, which means chance plays an outsized role in outcomes. A single pitch, a fractional difference in timing or angle, can determine an entire season.
Second is a quirk unique to baseball: the defense controls the ball, not the offense. The batter faces what Baird calls "a crazy power imbalance," standing alone against nine opponents in an environment of radical uncertainty.
Third is the sheer repetition. Over a 162-game regular season, a batter might see more than a dozen pitches per game. Each pitch represents a split-second window for contact. "It compounds the elements of uncertainty and luck," Baird explains. "It's a perfect environment for magic to thrive."
Baird draws parallels from anthropology and psychology to understand why humans gravitate toward ritual under these conditions. She references Bronislaw Malinowski's early 20th-century study of South Pacific fishermen, who performed no magical rituals in calm inner lagoons but developed elaborate ones in the unpredictable open sea. "What happens in baseball is uncertainty, prediction of failure, a high degree of luck," Baird notes. "The human brain is almost perfectly designed to latch on in this way."
The book also explores baseball's larger mythologies and curses. The Boston Red Sox infamously sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees in 1920, and did not win another World Series for 86 years, losing in agonizing fashion along the way. Most famous was Game 6 of the 1986 World Series, when a ground ball rolled through Bill Buckner's legs, extending the Mets' life in the series.
Baseball itself, Baird suggests, mirrors the structure of classical mythology. According to MLB's official historian John Thorn, the game echoes Homer's "Odyssey." A batter leaves home, either fails or embarks on a journey through the bases, with the goal of returning home. "The story of this myth is embedded in the game itself," Baird says. "Magic is in its very structure."
Baird organized her book into nine chapters to reflect the nine innings of baseball, drawing on research at the Library of Congress and interviews with historians. She is also now a practicing astrologer, offering readings to clients after discovering the discipline during her research.
The question of whether modern baseball has killed its magic looms over the work. Sabermetrics and recent rule changes like the pitch clock seemed to strip away the sport's mystique. But Baird revised her thinking as she researched. She discovered that observers have declared baseball dead since the 1860s. "An unchanging thing is a dead thing," she concluded. As for sabermetrics themselves, she now sees them as tools that reveal baseball's underlying magic rather than destroy it.
Author James Rodriguez: "The book succeeds because it takes baseball's most irrational impulses seriously, refusing to mock what most people privately do anyway."
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