From players avoiding foul lines to never uttering the dreaded words \u201cno hitter\u201d to fans refusing to wash their favorite lucky jerseys, baseball is stepped in superstitions.<\/strong><\/p>\n In\u00a0The Magical Game<\/em>, journalist and converted baseball fan Addy Baird turns her reporter\u2019s eye to her favorite sport: baseball. For more than 150 years, a magical culture has been central to the the sport. Baird investigates the roots of these magical practices and tells the story of baseball\u2019s long history of superstition, rituals, curses, jinxes, hoodoos, and hexes. Read on for a featured excerpt shared with The History Reader<\/em>.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n John McGraw\u2019s Giants were struggling. The team wasn\u2019t hitting, and McGraw was running out of ideas for pulling them out of their prolonged downward spiral.<\/p>\n \u201cThe batting of all the players slumped at the same time,\u201d pitcher Christy Mathewson wrote in his 1912 memoir. \u201cNone could hit, and the club was losing game after game as a result, because the easiest pitchers were making the best batters look foolish. One day [catcher Frank] Bowerman came into the clubhouse with a smile on his face for the first time in a week. \u2018Saw a big load of empty barrels this afternoon, boys,\u2019 he announced, \u2018and just watch me pickle the pill out there to-day.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n At the time, seeing a load of empty barrels on the move was considered good luck, and for Bowerman it turned out to be: According to Mathewson, the catcher went out that day and managed four hits in five plate appearances. This gave McGraw an idea. The next day, several more players arrived at the clubhouse and announced they, too, had seen a load of barrels. \u201cThey, then, all went out and regained their old batting strides, and we won that afternoon for the first time in a week,\u201d Mathewson wrote. It happened again the next day: Giants players saw a load of empty barrels on their way to the Polo Grounds and went on to play well. \u201cAt last all the members of the team had met the barrels, and men with averages of .119 were threatening to chisel into the three-hundred set,\u201d the pitcher wrote. \u201cWith remarkable regularity the players were meeting loads of empty barrels on their way to the park, and, with remarkable regularity and a great deal of expedition, the players of opposing clubs were being driven to the shower baths.\u201d<\/p>\n It seemed like magic\u2014but there was something strange about the whole ordeal, as second baseman Billy Gilbert noticed: He was always seeing the barrels on a carriage driven by the same horses, one white and one brown. Third baseman Billy Lauder confirmed he was seeing the same. Finally, McGraw spoke up.<\/p>\n \u201cI hired that load of empty barrels by the week to drive around and meet you fellows on the way to the park,\u201d he told them. \u201cYou don\u2019t think I can afford to have them change horses every day, do you?\u201d<\/p>\n The team had a laugh, and McGraw soon stopped paying for the barrels to be carted around outside the stadium, but the trick had worked. \u201cHis scheme stopped a batting slump and put the club\u2019s hitters on their feet again,\u201d Mathewson wrote. \u201cAnd just seeing those barrels gave them the idea that they were bound to get base hits, and they got them.\u201d<\/p>\n I love this story. It is, for one thing, a perfect encapsulation of baseball\u2019s long-standing culture of superstition, but it also captures something deeper: There is magic, evidently, in believing in magic<\/em>.<\/p>\n Baseball as we know it is more than 150 years old, and its history has been consistently marked by powerful spells superstitious rituals, generational curses, and attempts to bend the forces of luck and fate\u2014attempts to form the unknowable universe into a knowable and controllable one\u2014 and to win baseball games in the process.<\/p>\n This remarkable history of occult practice and magical thinking is made all the more novel by the fact that, over the last three decades, Major League Baseball has undergone a transformation, the result of a statistical revolution that changed the way teams scout and value players, how managers construct lineups, and how baseball people everywhere understand the game. What was once a sport grounded in tradition, nostalgia, and vibes has become the most statistically advanced on the planet, but there remains at its core something illogical and un-algorithmizable.<\/p>\n This magic survives in the face of technological and scientific advancement, and its roots can be traced back eons, to the earliest days of the game, and the earliest eras of human civilization. It defines the history of baseball and defines our relationship to it.<\/p>\n We see it in the at-bat rituals of players across the league, and we catch a glimpse of it in the rally caps and the untouched foul lines and players wearing the same cleats today as they wore in last night\u2019s win. McGraw\u2019s players sensed it in their not-so-coincidental lucky barrel sightings, and, more than a century later, I tasted that magic for the first time one night in Queens that changed my life and led me to write this book. If you\u2019ve ever watched your team hit a walk-off home run or refused to stand up during a no-hit game or sat in the sun at the ballpark on a Sunday afternoon, you\u2019ve tasted it, too.<\/p>\n One of the few scholarly pieces on the subject of baseball magic\u2014titled exactly that, \u201cBaseball Magic\u201d\u2014was published in 1971 by former minor league baseball player George Gmelch. It opens: \u201cOn each pitching day for the first three months of a winning season, Dennis Grossini, a pitcher on a Detroit Tigers farm team, arose from bed at exactly 10:00 am. At 1:00 pm he went to the nearest restaurant for two glasses of iced tea and a tuna sandwich. Although the afternoon was free, he changed into the sweatshirt and supporter he wore during his last winning game, and, one hour before the game, he chewed a wad of Beech-Nut chewing tobacco. After each pitch during the game he touched the letters on his uniform and straightened his cap after each ball. Before the start of each inning he replaced the pitcher\u2019s resin bag next to the spot where it was the inning before. And after every inning in which he gave up a run, he washed his hands.\u201d<\/p>\n Today, Gmelch is an anthropologist, and he saw in his fellow baseball players a type of magical practice that reminded him of Bronislaw Malinowski\u2019s research about Trobriand Islanders\u2019 fishing habits. Malinowski found that when the islanders fished in the safer and more plentiful inner lagoons, they did not engage in magical rituals hoping to ensure safe and plentiful fishing. When they fished in open waters, however\u2014more dangerous and less consistent\u2014they frequently called upon the supernatural for support.<\/p>\n \u201cWe find magic whenever the elements of chance and accident, and the emotional play between hope and fear, have a wide and extensive range,\u201d Malinowski wrote. \u201cWe do not find magic whenever the pursuit is certain, reliable, and well under control of rational methods.\u201d See: baseball, a game of chance and accident played on the wide spectrum between hope and fear.<\/p>\n For starters, baseball is the only major North American sport in which the defense, not the offense, has the ball, and that defense has a lopsided amount of power\u2014nine players spread across the field\u2014while the offense has between one and, at best, with the bases loaded, four. (Consider, on the other hand, football, hockey, soccer, and basketball, all of which have equal numbers of offensive and defensive players on the field at any given time.)<\/p>\n This is the thing about baseball: It is really, really hard. The most successful hitters in Major League Baseball succeed just three in every ten tries. A 90-mile-per-hour fastball (which would be considered slow at the highest echelons of today\u2019s game) is in the strike zone for just ten milliseconds, and making contact hardly guarantees success. \u201cI\u2019ve always said that hitting a baseball is the hardest thing to do in sports. The hardest thing,\u201d Ted Williams\u2014 one of the greatest hitters in the history of the game\u2014once said. \u201cRound ball, round bat, curves, sliders, knuckleballs, upside down and a ball coming in at 90 miles to 100 miles an hour, it\u2019s a pretty lethal thing.\u201d And, unfortunately, lethal it has been: Players hit by pitched balls, particularly in the head, have faced serious and sometimes career-ending injuries\u2014and, in the horrific case of Cleveland Indians shortstop Ray Chapman, even death.\u00a0<\/p>\n In the face of this difficulty and danger, baseball people of all stripes turn to magic.<\/p>\n ***<\/strong><\/p>\n Before we fully turn to the subject of baseball magic, it\u2019s important that we define what magic is<\/em>. \u201cWe see no easy origin to magic, because it has always been with us,\u201d archeologist Chris Gosden wrote in his book Magic: A History<\/em>. \u201cMagic is crucial: people did not just aim to survive in the world, but to make sense of it, to explore their modes of participation with other substances and species.\u201d<\/p>\n The root of our English word \u201cmagic\u201d comes from the Latin root magus<\/em>, which comes from the Greek word \u03bc\u03ac\u03b3\u03bf\u03c2<\/em> (magos), which in turn descended from the Persian word magu\u0161<\/em>\u200a\u200a\u200a or magi<\/em>, referring to priests: Magic was the work of the magi. In the Roman era, \u201cmagic\u201d took on a more derogatory tone, and came to mean the invocation of demons. By the early common era, Christian leaders had turned the word around and used \u201cmagic\u201d to refer to anti-Christian practices and beliefs.<\/p>\n Theologian St. Augustine led this charge. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t matter if it\u2019s good or bad,\u201d said Exeter professor Catherine Rider, an expert on the history of magic in the Middle Ages. \u201cIf it doesn\u2019t work naturally, then you must have demons involved somewhere.\u201d This, as you might imagine, can be a complicated stance for Christians to take: Religious practices do not \u201cwork naturally,\u201d and many Christian traditions\u2014like, say, Christmas and Easter\u2014are \u201cmagical\u201d pagan traditions adopted and adapted by the church. So, too, Rider said, were the healing charms of the ancient world, which originated as appeals to pagan gods and were later reformed by the church to call on saints or the healing power of Christ. \u201cThere\u2019s this idea that if you can say powerful words and direct them to the right person, that\u2019s okay,\u201d Rider said. \u201cThey all believe that there are supernatural beings out there, and it\u2019s about who you\u2019re talking to and how you are talking to them.\u201d<\/p>\n Getting a good sense of magic and superstitious practices in the Middle Ages can be difficult, however, given the way the Christian church dominates the narrative. \u201cIt\u2019s mostly the church who can read and write,\u201d Rider said, and thus it\u2019s the church recording history from its own perspective. But, she added: \u201cIt\u2019s fairly clear from the amount of complaining they do that there\u2019s quite a lot of magic going on.\u201d<\/p>\n With the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, that critique of magical practice was turned on the Catholic Church. \u201c[The Protestants] say, \u2018Well, if you\u2019re going on pilgrimage to a saint, you\u2019re not really worshiping God, you\u2019re worshiping the saint, and that\u2019s magic,\u2019\u201d Rider said. \u201cOr, you know, \u2018Ringing church bells to keep storms off, that sounds like magic.\u2019 So Protestants really try and redefine a lot of what the medieval church used to do as a way of criticizing it and distancing themselves from it.\u201d<\/p>\n Today, despite thousands of years of magical practice and debate under our collective human belt, magic remains difficult to define and debated by scholars, psychologists, practitioners, religious leaders, grifters, artists, and baseball players. For psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, magic was a sort of \u201cinfantile neurosis,\u201d not unlike the illusory form of wish fulfillment he saw in religion. Magic, Freud argued, was a primitive stage of religion itself: He believed human civilizations progressed through three stages, beginning with magic, then transitioning to religion, and finally to science. (Never mind that Freud and many of his disciples had a long history of occult interests.)<\/p>\n Carl Jung, meanwhile, tended to a more spiritual view of the psyche, defining the practice of magic in his seminal work The Red Book<\/em> as \u201cmaking what is not understood understandable in an incomprehensible manner.\u201d This view, he admits, is confusing, \u201cbut this is what magic is like.\u201d We need it, he wrote, to be \u201cable to receive or invoke the messenger and the communication of the incomprehensible.\u201d He concurred with Malinowski: \u201cWhere reason abides, magic is not necessary.\u201d<\/p>\n One distinction worth making is the difference between magic in a supernatural sense and magic in an illusionary sense. I asked Charlie Ross, a D.C.-based stage magician, how he defines magic, and I expected him to make a distinction between the performance of magic as entertainment and truly magical beliefs, but his answer surprised me: \u201cThere is no reality except the one contained with us,\u201d Ross said, quoting the poet Hermann Hesse. Ross is an illusionist, and his act focuses on card tricks and visual deception, but that performance, he told me, has made him realize how much we see every day that we don\u2019t really process\u2014how much happens right in front of us but never becomes real.<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cA lot of visual illusions kind of break this spell, and show us that our perception isn\u2019t 100% [correct], that we miss these things, and we take these large leaps and assumptions throughout the day and throughout our lives,\u201d he said. \u201cMagic shows us that we have these little hiccups. We have these little holes that stuff falls through all the time.\u201d Illusions show us what we miss, he said: \u201cIt comes off as a total difference between reality and the world that [we] perceive.\u201d This form of magic is alive and well in baseball, too. Take, for example, the curveball: At first, it looks like it\u2019s coming straight across the plate, only to suddenly, at the last moment, bend away, bend the laws of nature.<\/p>\n But real<\/em> magic has not just an illusionary element but a fundamentally supernatural one. As Major League Baseball\u2019s official historian John Thorn put it to me, magic is \u201cthe art and\/or illusion of connecting with a world of spirit: leaving the body and the physical bounds of earth.\u201d In this sense, he said, sports and sex\u2014and a \u201cvariety of ecstasies,\u201d like, I\u2019d argue, drugs and sleep\u2014can be seen as magical.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen attached to an object, magic is sublimated to a thing that enables a transference of power (or its illusion),\u201d Thorn wrote. \u201cThis is why Amazonian headhunters shrink the skulls of those they have vanquished in battle and wear them around their waists in a belt. This is akin to the practice of collecting\u2014baseball cards, autographs, game-worn this and that. Calling Dr. Freud.\u201d<\/p>\n Traditionally, this form of power transference through an object is known as sympathetic magic, a term that comes from The Golden Bough<\/em>, an expansive and controversial study of religion and mythology first published in 1890 by anthropologist Sir James George Frazer. \u201cIf we analyze the principles of thought on which magic is based, they will probably be found to resolve themselves into two,\u201d Frazer wrote. \u201cFirst, that like produces like, or that an effect resembles its cause; and, second, that things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed.<\/p>\n Baseball players have long tried to work with sympathetic magic: Gmelch recounts the story of Pacific Coast Leaguer Alan Foster, a pitcher who forgot his usual shoes at a game one night, borrowed a teammate\u2019s, and went on to pitch a no-hitter. Foster, of course, bought the shoes from his teammate after the victory. Similarly, in 2019, Phillies infielder Brad Miller brought a potted bamboo plant to a game and declared that the plant would break the team\u2019s losing streak\u2014a move that Miller said had worked for him as a minor leaguer. It worked in the big leagues, too: The Phillies notched thirteen runs that night and soon began to orient a messy season.<\/p>\n Among all these definitions of magic, the one that stuck with me came from Gosden, who defined magic as \u201chuman participation in the universe.\u201d I love the expansiveness of this definition, which encompasses changing perspectives on magic over the course of history and allows for a wide range of magic practices. It also speaks to every form of baseball magic: the superstitions adhered to by athletes and fans alike, the legacy of baseball\u2019s great curses, and the ephemeral magic of pure presence and timelessness offered by the game.<\/p>\nIntroduction<\/strong><\/h3>\n
![\"New](\"https:\/\/www.thehistoryreader.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/1904_Christy_Mathewson_by_Conlon-214x300.jpg\")
![\"Early](\"https:\/\/www.thehistoryreader.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Kyle_field_baseball_game.jpg\")