Curses, superstitions and pre-game rituals have been part of baseball for as long as the game has been around. What’s behind the magical traditions of America’s pastime.

Guests

Addy Baird, author of “The Magical Game: The Spirit and History of Baseball’s Superstitions, Rituals, and Curses.”

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Transcript of Full Broadcast

The version of our broadcast available at the top of this page and via podcast apps is a condensed version of the full show. You can listen to the full, unedited broadcast here:

Part I

AMORY SIVERTSON: I’m Amory Sivertson in for Meghna Chakrabarti.

YESTERDAY’S NEWS REEL: The boy from Baltimore makes big time baseball via Boston. It’s 1914, and a rookie named George Herman Ruth is already drawing crowds and cheers. By 1916, he’s Boston’s leading pitcher and World Series whiz. His hurling record of nearly 30 consecutive scoreless innings in Fall Classics competition still stands.

SIVERTSON: Whether you follow baseball or not, America’s pastime is full of larger-than-life figures, unforgettable stories, beloved rituals, and dreaded curses. One of the most famous curses in baseball, and in all of sports really, is the Curse of the Bambino. When the Bambino, A.K.A. George Herman “Babe” Ruth, joined the Boston Red Sox, the team was one of the winningest in the country.

Ruth helped bring them three World Series titles in 1915, 1916, and 1918 before he was famously sold, really infamously sold, to the New York Yankees for the 1920 season.

YESTERDAY’S NEWS REEL: His power at the plate, his promise as a hitter of home runs, bring an end to his pitching days. And as an outfielder in 1920, he becomes a New York Yankee.

At St. Petersburg, Florida for spring training, Babe’s his own bat boy, and at the plate warms up. From famed Yank manager Miller Huggins and teammates of the ’20s, Babe’s clowning gets attention.

But this is the house that Ruth built with a bat. Stadium home run twins, Lou Gehrig and Babe. The pair at work, a triple for Babe.

As he strides for third, Gehrig steps to the plate, and sure enough, it happens. Homer for Lou. With the ball in the bleachers, Babe jogs home with Gehrig trotting in behind him.

SIVERTSON: Those are clips from a segment of the show Yesterday’s News Reel titled America’s Idol. And Babe Ruth’s star power was undeniable, so the transfer from Boston to New York, it was a devastating blow to one team, and it marked the beginning of a historic dynasty for the other.

What followed was decades of frustration in Boston, and for generations of Red Sox fans, even long after The Bambino retired from the game, there was only one possible explanation: a curse.

(CURSE OF THE BAMBINO CLIPS)

Here’s what I want on my tombstone: He never lived long enough to see the Red Sox win it all. People will understand, whether it’s 50 years from now or 100 years from now or 1,000 years from now, they’ll understand that message.

I blame the curse. There was a better chance that a boat was going to fall out of the sky than Bucky Dent was going to hit a home run.

There is some kind of a curse.

I do think there’s a curse because you can’t get that close that many times and fail.

SIVERTSON: The Red Sox wouldn’t win another World Series until 2004, an 86-year drought. They came close a few times, close enough that when it all came crashing down each time, fans couldn’t help but credit their sorrows to the supernatural.

(CURSE OF THE BAMBINO CLIPS)

I was working in Jacksonville, Florida, and when the Red Sox were 14 and a half games in front, I decided to quit my job down there to come home, because I wanted to be at home when the Red Sox finally won the whole thing.

Everything seemed great. And then —

September came, and somebody turned the baseball world upside down.

It was a gradual decline, like somebody with a disease getting sicker by the day.

SIVERTSON: Those are moments from The Curse of the Bambino, a 2003 HBO documentary about the bad luck streak that came out just a year before the curse was broken.

Of course, The Curse of the Bambino is hardly the only mystical lore in the sport of baseball. Magic of all kinds, curses, jinxes, good luck charms, superstitions, jerseys you never wash, words you never say on game day. The list goes on and on. So today, we’re talking baseball, but really we’re talking the magic of baseball with Addy Baird.

She’s a journalist and author of a new book called The Magical Game: The Spirit and History of Baseball’s Superstitions, Rituals, and Curses. Addy Baird, welcome to On Point.

ADDY BAIRD: Hi. It’s so good to be here.

SIVERTSON: It’s so great to have you. And first things first, I guess I got to say I’m sorry for your loss. I saw that your beloved Mets fell to the Phillies last night.

Were you watching the game?

BAIRD: (LAUGHS) I was not watching last night. I’m actually on vacation in Mexico. But I was keeping up, and I will say that’s not nearly as bad as what happened two days before when they lost 15 to 3.

SIVERTSON: Ah, yes, and this comes pretty late in your book, but there’s mention of the fact that when the Knicks are having a strong postseason, that means that things are bad for the Mets, and of course, the Knicks just had the best postseason.

They won the NBA championship, and the Mets are currently in the cellar of the National League East. Is this just an entree to the magic that we’re going to be discussing, Addy? Can they turn it around?

BAIRD: Of course, I believe they can turn it around. That’s the heart of baseball magic and of all magic.

It is funny. I’m a Knicks fan as well, and when the Knicks were down 29 points in game four, I checked the Mets score, and they had just lost, and I turned to my partner and I said, “We’re good.”

SIVERTSON: (LAUGHS) Okay. So let’s get into the magic. Really, we have to get into the start of baseball for you, and this is interesting because I was raised by baseball fans, so I feel like I inherited baseball fandom.

But you came to baseball as an adult. So give us the Addy Baird baseball fan origin story.

BAIRD: Yes, totally. I did come to baseball as an adult. I played softball a little bit as a kid, and I quit to do musical theater. And it was totally this kind of pivot point in my life. It was one of the first choices that I made, and I have a memory of that, of being like, I’m done with this And I decided I wanted to go, I grew up in suburban Utah. I wanted to go to New York for college, and I got into NYU, and I loved so much about the school, but I was always saying that I loved that they didn’t have a football team because I felt like sports were for brutes, basically. But you mentioned the Knicks, and I think people have seen all across the country and all across the world what happens in New York when their sports teams are good, and the way that it becomes about something way bigger than the sport itself.

And in 2015, I was living in New York City, and the Mets were in the World Series, and there was a version of that happening in the city, and I could feel it, and it was really special, and I really wanted to be a part of it. And —

SIVERTSON: Oh, please go ahead. Yeah, so this is game three of the 2015 World Series that you actually go to with your dad.

Take us back to that game and what happened to you during that game.

BAIRD: Yes. First of all, Noah Syndergaard was pitching. The Mets had lost the first two games in Kansas City on the road, and Syndergaard had this first pitch that strayed high. It was a fastball. Alcides Escobar fell over onto his butt and really was upset by the pitch, and I was like, “Wow, that’s a tough way to start the game.”

But everyone around me understood that it was a message, and it was this fireball to start what was going to happen in New York in that game. And he went on to strike Escobar out, and I turned to my dad. I felt the feeling in Citi Field around me, and I turned to my dad, and I was like, “I get it now. I understand sports now.”

And throughout the course of the game, we talked to people around us, and it was a very special game. David Wright hit a home run. He was the captain of the Mets at the time. It was, in the end, the only game in that series that the Mets won, and I got to be there for it. And when the game ended, this old man that we had been sitting next to and had made friends with, this Queens native, he took my hands, and he looked me in the eye, and he said, “You’re a Mets fan now.”

And I was like, “Of course. Totally. I’m in.” And he said to me, “It’s going to suck.”

(BOTH LAUGH)

SIVERTSON: You’re in for a hard road, but you’re in. So you didn’t grow up a baseball fan, but you did grow up religious and having a long history of spiritual practice, what are the commonalities between having a faith in religion and having faith in a baseball team or a player?

Other than the fact that, as you point out, there are 108 beads on a Catholic rosary, and there are 108 stitches on a baseball?

BAIRD: Yes. That is a quote people might recognize from one of my favorite movies, Bull Durham, and she says, “When I heard that, I gave Jesus a chance.” Which is just such a great line.

I did grow up religious. I’m not religious anymore, but I am a spiritual person, and I think whatever your relationship is to God, it’s a daily practice. I don’t know anyone who has a deep relationship to spirituality or to divinity in any form that is like, “Oh, yeah, that’s a sometimes thing for me.” And baseball is very similar.

There is 182 games in a season. It is, or 162. Sorry, still getting my brain online this morning as we’re recording. But it’s such a daily practice in the summertime. I found when I started to get into baseball that I was hearing people say all the time, “There’s too much baseball. How could I ever be a baseball fan? There’s too many games. How could I keep up?”

But I would notice that on the few days in the summertime that there wasn’t a Mets game, I was like, “What do I do with myself?” Baseball becomes a ritual. The actual daily nature of the game has this element of magic to it that I think is very similar to being a person of faith, where you wake up, you pray, you meditate, you engage in this communion with a higher power that I think baseball really replicates.

SIVERTSON: Now, we should say that up to this point, your career has been as a political reporter. You’ve covered both impeachments of Donald Trump, the January 6th riot, and I imagine in today’s political climate in the country, politics feels pretty disenchanting compared to the enchantment and the romance of baseball.

We have to take a quick break here in a second, but briefly, what does baseball do for your spirit?

BAIRD: It’s a beautiful question. It’s definitely an escape from the daily grind of covering politics. It’s got a lightness to it, but I think, as important for our culture in a lot of ways.

Part II

SIVERTSON: Addy, there are many different ways to define magic, but how do you define it when talking about baseball?

BAIRD: It’s a harder question than you might think on first blush, and it was one of the things that I really started to dig into when I was early in the process of reporting out this book was, what does that even mean? And there were many different little rabbit holes to go down when exploring that question.

I looked at what Jung says. He says that magic is basically giving a description to the indescribable. I looked at what scientists and artists and psychologists have said over the years, and eventually I actually landed on a definition from an archeologist. His name is Chris Gosden. And he says that magic is human participation in the universe. And I love this definition because it encapsulates all of the forms of magic that I look at in the book, but it also doesn’t take magic in opposition to this question of science or religion. What is its relationship to these other two really fundamental pieces of human history?

And Gosden says that magic, science, and religion, rather than being opposed, are more like a DNA helix that’s embedded in the human genome and psyche. So what is it about baseball that lends itself to magical thinking? Is it something about the fundamentals of the game itself? I absolutely think it’s something about the game itself.

There’s some really interesting research looking at whether baseball players are more superstitious to begin with than non-baseball playing people. And the answer is no. It’s not that the game attracts more superstitious people. So we can write that one off. What it is I really think, and there’s a lot of research that shows, that baseball lends itself to superstitious thinking for several reasons, one of which is that baseball is predicated on failure.

And when we look at research about superstition, we don’t see people doing superstitious behavior when the act, the thing that they’re trying to do is certain or easy. We see people engaging in magical behavior when it’s hard, when it’s uncertain. And baseball, which is predicated on failure, is hard and uncertain, and I really think that is part of it.

SIVERTSON: That’s what I think is at least a piece of what inclines the human mind to engage in magic when playing baseball. Okay, that’s a big statement in and of itself, that baseball is predicated on failure, which I’m sure some people who are not as inclined to go to a baseball game would go, “Then why go? Why put myself through this?” What is your answer to that?

BAIRD: Because when you succeed, it’s especially magical. It’s especially amazing. It’s unique to watch a sport where, you know, seven in 10 times, a great player is going to fail, and it really makes you aware of how difficult it is to play baseball and to play baseball well.

And I think that really, as a converted fan myself, it really feels special when you see something like a game-changing home run because you know that you’re seeing something that isn’t just routine.

SIVERTSON: Okay, so I want to talk about some of the rituals. You say that baseball players are not more superstitious than anyone else. And we will get into that, but we have some examples of rituals that might suggest otherwise, including third baseman Wade Boggs.

So Wade Boggs was famous for a very particular ritual. In this case, it was eating chicken. He was so religious about it, he was dubbed the Chicken Man, and here he is in an interview with Conan O’Brien in 1993, talking about this nearly religious chicken consumption and what would happen if he skipped the chicken dinner.

CONAN O’BRIEN: For example, you eat chicken before every game. Is that right?

WADE BOGGS: Every day game or just before a night game. Have to have chicken, but on day games the old adage, “Which came first, chicken or the egg?” So you have eggs. So it’s the daily ritual that I take into every game.

O’BRIEN: Now, was there ever a day when you didn’t have chicken before the game?

BOGGS: Unfortunately. Unfortunately, in 1985 it was the last day of a home stand, and my wife didn’t get to the grocery store that day and consequently, we had pork chops that day. It was a very dreary performance.

0-4, two errors struck out twice and got hit in the elbow by Cal Ripken in an overthrow into the dugout. Needless to say, pork chops has not been on the menu.

O’BRIEN: Stick to chicken, right?

BOGGS: Stick to chicken.

SIVERTSON: Addy, this is incredible, and this was just one of many rituals that Wade Boggs participated in.

It was said that he would, what, field 150 ground balls in practice every day. He wore the same socks to every game. There’s former Mets first baseman Jason Giambi, who would wear a gold thong any time he was playing poorly and called that his foolproof move. The Mets relief pitcher Turk Wendell wouldn’t step on foul lines.

He pitched with four pieces of black licorice in his mouth, and he brushed his teeth in between innings. Do you have a favorite ritual that you’ve heard of or witnessed yourself?

BAIRD: I love the Wade Boggs rituals. I love that you played that clip because, A, they’re so extensive, and B, they’re so particular.

He would leave the dugout at 6:57 every game. It’s this very particular timing and eating and dressing that he has where the entire game is a ritual. And of course, I think even non-baseball fans listening to this will recognize that name and know that he is one of the greatest players that the sport has ever seen.

I think that’s also just so charming that it seems like it worked for him.

SIVERTSON: So where do these rituals come from? What is the thinking behind, “If I don’t eat the same chicken dinner at the same time, if I don’t wear the same socks, not only will I not play my best, but something bad could happen to the team, and I could be responsible for it.”

BAIRD: Yeah. One of the things that I was curious about early on in the process of this book was to look at where did this start? Where does the magic and the ritual superstition begin in baseball? And you go all the way back to the earliest days of baseball, and you see this. You go all the way back to the earliest days of human history, some of the earliest evidence we have of human civilization is of ritual performance.

And it’s, I think, innate to us as human beings to perform some sort of ritual. And what the studies show is that when we have sports rituals, when players perform superstitious rituals. Within any sport, it actually offers them something very real. It is not just magical thinking. It has this ability to calm a player, give them confidence, ground them.

And in that way, ritual works.

Think about the kind of routines that coaches and managers often recommend to athletes. There’s this approach that’s one thing over and over before every game, stretching, Advil. And I talked to players who said these scientifically-backed things, stretching, taking your, having your Advil, being prepared in these scientifically-backed physical ways, get really intertwined with I have to stand in a certain place, I have to do a certain thing, and that they perform a very similar function, which might be hard to understand if you’ve never played sports, but we do versions of this in our day-to-day lives all the time.

And it really is, I think, part of what it is to be human.

SIVERTSON: Yeah, and there’s a sort of, I don’t know, it feels a little at odds that something like a ritual that is grounded in superstition would actually be centering for a person. So what is it about otherwise logical, rational, whether they’re baseball players or baseball fans, that suddenly makes them throw all of that sort of out the window when it comes to baseball, and believe that these sort of grounding practices are actually what will make the difference in a game?

BAIRD: It does seem a little bit at odds, right? And it’s interesting. Because what I argue in the book is that it’s actually not. Because we have a whole body of research that shows that doing your ritual, I think that we all understand this in our day-to-day lives. Many of us have a routine for getting ready to go to work.

Waking up, having coffee, getting ready, taking a shower. And we know that if you don’t, you wake up, you’re out of coffee. You wake up, there’s no hot water, the whole day feels off. You know you’re not going to perform the way that you normally would. And I think the exact same thing is true for baseball players.

The exact same thing is true for baseball fans. There’s this element where our routine helps us to feel ready in a very real way, and ready in a psychological way. And it does actually have a real manifestation in our lives that is beyond the magic. And that, I think, is very interesting to see the ways that magic gets backed up by science, or backed up by the feeling of going through our day.

It’s easy to think this is just magical thinking when Wade Boggs eats chicken. But imagine eating chicken every single day, and one day you eat pork chops. It would probably throw you off, too.

SIVERTSON: Yeah, it is amazing as a fan just how much feels uncertain at a baseball game. You feel like even with, as skilled as the players are, as hard as they work, that when a game starts, anything can happen.

And it does feel like perhaps just the things that you can control, staying on top of the things that you can control, is maybe the best that you can hope for in a baseball game.

BAIRD: Yes, absolutely. And that is where magic comes into play. Because especially as fans, we cannot control what’s going on the field.

I cannot control what the Mets are doing, but I can perform my superstitions. And it feels to us like there is something that we are doing in a situation that feels otherwise very out of our control.

I cannot control what the Mets are doing, but I can perform my superstitions.

SIVERTSON: Speaking of things that are out of our control and fly in out of nowhere, we’ve talked about curses, but there are sometimes unexpected good luck charms that we cannot predict, and that take hold over an entire fandom, including a feathered one in 2022.

Let’s listen.

There’s a bird out in right center field, by the way. And it ducked right in. We need, we thought we saw everything in the game, and now a new friend wants to join our party.

Hello, friend.

The crowd was going crazy when they showed him on the big screen. Look at that thing.

That is not a small mallard either.

Is that a, is that, is a duck, right? Is that a goose? It might be a goose, actually. I’m not 100% sure.

SIVERTSON: Oh, it was a goose. That’s a clip from game two of the 2022 National League Division series between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the San Diego Padres, when a goose flew onto the field and then just sat there for a while during the eighth inning.

It delayed the game by a few minutes as workers tried to capture it. Of course, commentators there couldn’t stop laughing. The crowd couldn’t stop cheering. And when they finally cleared the goose from the field, the Padres won, and the luck of the rally goose was born.

FAN: Let’s go Padres. The goose is loose.

MISHA DiBONO: It started Thursday night when a goose flew on the field, causing a delay during the Padres’ come-from-behind series game with the Dodgers in LA, and it’s only taken flight from there.

FAN: When we started rallying, none of us moved. I had a beer. I hadn’t even opened it.

DiBONO: … The goose even inspiring one of the many billboards that have sprung up around the county.

SIVERTSON: That was a report from Fox 5 in San Diego, where reporter Misha DiBono did a live hit with a life-size goose statue in her hands. Fans liken the goose as a sign, not a coincidence. The Padres had a star pitcher named Goose Gossage in the 1980s, so when the rally goose took the field and led the Padres to a win, it could only mean good things ahead.

So Addy, have you had an experience like the rally goose, or have you had a ritual that you have engaged in as a fan of the Mets and of baseball in general?

BAIRD: Absolutely. First of all, the rally goose is amazing. It’s just incredible, and it’s how these things come to be.

There’s moments that just kind of sweep us away as a collective, and it’s so special in the way that they kind of catch us. As we’ve discussed, I’m a Mets fan, and in 2014, or excuse me, 2024, the Mets went 0 and 5 to start the season, and by the end, they made this incredible miracle playoff push and ended up getting all the way to game six of the National League Championship Series, and it was an incredibly superstitious season.

The moment that really turned things around for the Mets that year was in June when the McDonald’s mascot, Grimace, threw out the first pitch at Citi Field, and the Mets went on an absolute tear after that, and Grimace became a hero. And it was like this goose times a million, and it was just so special for months for Mets fans.

We really were, like, stanning the McDonald’s Corporation for a little while there because it really turned the season around. It was very magical, and that season was littered with little tchotchkes and magical thinking and magical beings and magical happenings, but Grimace was really the one. I think that’s the enduring rally season-changing mascot for Mets fans.

SIVERTSON: Okay. So the goose and Grimace, these are figures that come to mean something and do seem to, at least add some joy and some spirit to the game, if not some actual victory. But that really is the question for me is there anything to suggest, any statistics or signs to suggest that rituals or sort of charms like the goose work?

Do they make a team or a player perform better?

BAIRD: It’s the question. (LAUGHS) And I’ll start by saying I spoke to a psychologist who said that in some cases, our relationship with superstition is really a relationship with a lack of memory. When something doesn’t work, we just forget it. When something does, it becomes entrenched.

So there is this element of the things that we decide to remember. They’re real. However, I think one of the things that’s interesting to look at is this idea of the placebo effect. It shows us how powerful our minds are. We all know that this is a standard piece of pharmaceutical research, because people who believe that they are taking a drug to help them get better.

So I think when we believe that something is helping us, it can.

Part III

SIVERTSON: When I was thinking about this and my own relationship to baseball, I’ve been a lifelong baseball fan, I didn’t, you know, at first, I thought, I don’t really know that I have an example of this. And then it came to me that 2013, here in Boston where I’m based, it was the year of the Boston Marathon bombing, and the energy in the city just felt different that season for the Red Sox.

Big Papi had proclaimed, “This is our [expletive] city.” We were Boston Strong. There was this heightened sense of pride and community. So when the Red Sox made it to the World Series that year, I felt like I needed to show up. Not at the stadium, I didn’t have money for that, but I watched those six games at a bar with a crowd of other people, and I had this fear that if I didn’t watch the full game around other people, the Sox were going to lose.

And then when we won against the St. Louis Cardinals, I didn’t feel responsible for it and my logical brain knew that I had nothing to do with it, but I somehow felt like I had done my part for the Red Sox. So Addy, why is that? What is that feeling that I was feeling in 2013?

BAIRD: Oh, hearing you describe it, I am actually choking up.

It’s so beautiful because I think you capture what makes baseball so special, and all sports so special, is that it’s not about just the sport, it’s about the relationship with the city, and it’s about the relationship with community. And you talked about being raised by baseball people. I’m sure you understand the way that it creates a thread from everyone, from you to everyone that you knew and were watching these games with, but also to your ancestry.

And it’s a really unique, special thing that you’re tapping into with this performance of what I would call a superstition, that to you, maybe doesn’t, on first blush, you’re not like, “Oh no, I’m not a superstitious baseball fan,” but you were performing a superstitious ritual. And I think part of it is that when emotions are heightened, the bombing, the World Series in a vacuum, there’s that desire, as you say, to have a little bit of control.

And a lot of the fans that I talked to for this book described exactly what you’re describing, of I understand that I don’t control the team. People said that to me over and over. But they wanted to do their part, and there was that feeling that if you did your superstition, if I do my superstition, at least I’m doing my part, so that if they lose, I know it’s not my fault.

SIVERTSON: It’s not me, everybody.

BAIRD: I heard that all the time.

SIVERTSON: Yeah. And you also mentioned something that, as a Knicks fan as well, for you there’s magic in all sports. But what is it about the DNA of baseball that, in your mind, makes it more magical or lends itself to magical thinking maybe more than other sports?

BAIRD: Yeah. I think there’s a few things. As we discussed, it’s a game predicated on failure, and I think that alone lends itself to a lot of magical thinking and a lot of magical practice. I also think that there is something in the DNA of the game itself, and it was John Thorn, who’s Major League Baseball’s official historian, who pointed this out to me first, and I have thought about it every day since, for years since he said this. But baseball is the Odyssey. It is this ancient story that is so deeply embedded in humanity, where you have a player striking out, literally or figuratively. If they can make contact, if they can get on base, they’re out on this journey. And the goal, just like the goal of this ancient epic of The Odyssey, is to get home.

And there’s this mythology embedded in the game itself, and I think that is very magical, that there is something, there’s this ancient human story that is part of the structure of the game. And that’s part of my argument, that not only does the science of baseball being predicated on failure and the ways that the sport lends itself to superstitious thinking in scientific ways contribute to the magic, but that there is something in the very DNA of a game of baseball that is magical.

It is a magical story played out over and over again. And on top of that,

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Three is very central to magic and to storytelling, and baseball is built on threes. Three strikes, three outs, three times, three innings.

SIVERTSON: And you also point out that baseball is the only sport of the major professional sports in North America where the defense, the team in the field, has the ball. Which I had never thought about. What is it about that contributes to this inclination towards magical thinking?

BAIRD: As we’ve said several times, magic comes to play when the outcome is uncertain. And this is the very initial research about magic and why we do it looks at this. Island fishermen who fish in the inner lagoon, where the catch is plentiful and the waters are safe, they don’t do magical ritual to prepare themselves to fish.

They just go fish. When they fish in the open ocean, where the waters are uncertain, the catch is uncertain, magic is very important. And I think that baseball is similar. There’s this way where it’s a very uncertain game, and part of that is this imbalance that you mention, where the defense has the ball and they have more people on the field always.

Nine defensive players on the field at any given time, and at best, four offensive players. So there’s this huge power imbalance for the people trying to score that I think lends itself to this kind of magical thinking and magical behavior because it is uncertain. They’re island fisher than the open ocean.

SIVERTSON: I want to talk about jinxes too, which feel like the opposite of the ritual, the things that you don’t do to avoid a certain bad outcome, and probably the most notorious of these has to do with the no-hitter. So explain this for us and what the best practices are, let’s say, in baseball for both fans and players when it comes to the possibility of a no-hitter.

BAIRD: Yeah. The rule is if there has not yet been a hit in the game, do not say that there has not yet been a hit in the game. Don’t say he’s working a no-hitter. Don’t mention it. Don’t talk about it. This is absolutely, I think, the ultimate jinx in baseball history and in baseball today, and it comes from the early days of the game when players wouldn’t, and this is still true, but it originates from the dugouts, when players wouldn’t acknowledge or talk to a pitcher who was working a no-hitter.

And then it bled into the broadcast booth, and then it bled into fans, and it still exists today. And as we’ve been discussing, this superstitious behavior and superstitious practice comes from how difficult the game is, at least in part. And a no-hitter is so hard and so coveted and so rare that it has bred its own form of magical practice where you don’t talk about it.

SIVERTSON: Okay, we mentioned the Curse of the Bambino, which is, woo, very well-known, sadly very well-known here in Boston. But there’s another one that you write about called The Curse of the Billy Goat. Tell us this story.

BAIRD: Yeah, this is the other really famous American baseball curse. This is the curse that just hung over the heads of Cubs fans and players for 108 years.

And it’s got some similarities to the Curse of the Bambino, but it is unique. And it goes back to the ’40s, and at this point, though the Cubs had not won a World Series since 1918 or you know what? 1918 is the Red Sox year. The Cubs hadn’t won the World Series in many years, but they had been playing well.

They had been in the World Series a number of times in the ’30s and ’40s, and when a bar owner brought his Billy goat to the stadium, he was turned away. And although the Cubs had been in the World Series a number of times up to this point without winning, it was from that day forward, they made no World Series appearance for decades.

And it wasn’t talked about immediately at the time, but the Cubs had a run couple decades later, and it started to be this conversation in the newspapers about this bar owner bringing his goat, the goat getting thrown out, and him saying, I curse you. And it was this story that started to spawn through the decades, and as the Cubs continued to lose, the story continued to balloon, which is something that Boston fans are probably familiar with.

It wasn’t immediate when Ruth was sold to the Yankees that they said, “Oh, we’re cursed now.” It comes as you watch the team struggle. Curses are, we see curses in hindsight basically.

SIVERTSON: Yeah, I was going to say, it’s almost a way to cope with the fact that there must be some explanation for this long string of bad luck that is otherwise inexplicable.

BAIRD: Absolutely.

And it was interesting because when I was writing about curses, I would tell people, “Oh I’m working on a book about baseball magic. I’m writing about curses right now.” And everyone would ask me, “Is my team cursed? Are the Twins cursed? Are the Guardians cursed?” We almost want a curse because it’s some explanation other than it sucks, other than baseball is hard, other than, only one team can win every year.

There’s this strange desire that I think we have for a curse because it explains something.

SIVERTSON: I want to talk a bit about how baseball is changing because in the 21st century we saw the introduction of something called Sabermetrics, Saber standing for the Society of American Baseball Research.

And the founder of that originally defined it as the search for objective knowledge about baseball, which doesn’t sound all that magical to me, Addy, I gotta say. But is there a sense of increased magic or the potential for more magic when we are seeing a greater inclination towards wanting to know the stats, wanting to make it a math problem rather than a game of the soul and the spirit?

BAIRD: Yeah. I don’t think that those things are as opposed as some people do. As we’ve discussed, I came to baseball a bit late in life, and I was interested in Sabermetrics. I was curious what people were talking about, and I wanted to understand them, and it helped me to understand the game. When I was working on this book, I wanted to look at this question of whether Sabermetrics have killed the magic in some way.

And I landed on something really interesting, which is that Sabermetrics of course they can, you can get too into the math and lose the spirit, and I think there’s a lot of people who have had that experience. But the other thing that Sabermetrics can do is show us how much cannot actually be modeled and predicted and mathed out.

I was talking to some Sabermetricians as part of my reporting who said, “You can run your simulations a million times, and you’re never gonna get it exactly right. You can get within, you can get close, but you always have, when you’re looking at Sabermetrics, this element of luck, this element of the unknown that is alive in the game.”

And when we really get into the numbers, in some ways it reveals the ways that we cannot predict everything, and you can actually use Sabermetrics to isolate the luck factor in baseball, and that helped me to understand the magic and to see the way that this hand of uncertainty has a role to play in the game, no matter how much we math it out.

And that element of it was really interesting and magical to me rather than the opposite.

SIVERTSON: So there’s magic in the metrics and magic in the unmeasurable, I guess you could say.

BAIRD: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.

SIVERTSON: I’ve heard you describe this as a book for people who love baseball and a book for people who don’t care about baseball at all, and wherever someone listening to this today falls on that spectrum, are there lessons from the magic of baseball that you think we can all be carrying with us in our everyday lives and maybe should all be carrying with us in our everyday lives as our lives continue to get just increasingly busy, increasingly distracted all the ways in which we have changed but the game has not?

BAIRD: Totally. As we were talking about at the start, I’m a spiritual person and I have a spiritual practice, and the heart of that is my meditation practice. And I’ve realized at some point that meditation and baseball had a little bit of a similar feeling. Baseball is outside of time, even though we have a pitch clock now, which I’m actually not against.

There is a way where the game itself exists in this pocket. It could go on infinitely, theoretically, and there’s something very special about that. For me, baseball makes me feel very present, and watching a game, it takes me outside of the day-to-day life, and I think there’s something very special that it offers if we’re willing to let us, if we’re willing to let the game bring us into that space.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.