Up in Ontario

Baseball Superstitions and the Mariners' Religion

In honour of spending this past Saturday down in Seattle at Safeco Field watching the Mariners play the Boston Red Sox, I present a the Top 10 Superstitious Athletes from CBC Sports. 7 of the top 10 are baseball players, with Wade Boggs leading the list, eating chicken every day before the game. The Chicken Man, as he came to be known, made a way of life of his superstitions.

...Boggs would eat poultry before every game and was obsessively compulsive about his routine.

He took exactly 150 ground balls during infield practice and had a fixation on time. He entered the batting cage at exactly 5:17 p.m. and ran wind sprints at 7:17 p.m.

Before each at-bat, he would write the Hebrew word "Chai" – meaning life – into the dirt of the batter's box.

Between pitches, he had a habit if he was playing defence: he'd swipe the dirt in front of him with his left foot, tap his glove two or three times and adjust his cap.

That just seems like so much wasted energy to me. But everyone has their own religion.

For instance, the Mariners game this past Saturday was the first professional baseball game I had ever seen live, and it did not disappoint. My first impressions were rich and vivid.

We showed up early to the park just in time to see last of the Red Sox batting practice. Manny Ramirez stroked a few out of the park, then Dave Ortiz skulked in the cage and dug in with his cleats. Pock! after Pock! followed as he stroked the turkeys served up by the coach into the sky, every single ball arcing higher and higher, white dots clearing the fence in right field, left field, over centre field and into the upper deck. The crowd loved it and the half-full stadium buzzed with noise and energy. After the monster stroke to the upper deck Ortiz skulked out of the cage to the dugout. He was done with warm up.

Once the game started it took me awhile to get into it. Everything seemed so slow: the warming up, the wait between pitches, the changeover between innings. My friend cb, whose tickets we had luckily snagged just that morning and a big baseball fan in his own right, told me to watch for the nuances of the game. "I believe this is what they call a pitchers duel," he told me after the third inning ended with zeros across the scoreboard - Runs, Hits, Errors.

I bought some peanuts and baseball beers for all three of us and started noticing the finer details of the experience. After each pitch the scoreboard displayed its speed and we started to distinguish between a 98 MPH fastball (which we saw - wow!) and a 78 MPH curveball. By the sixth inning I had found my stride, or rather, I had aligned myself with the pace of the game and began to enjoy the deliberateness and ritual of the game. And the scoring started, highlighted by a bases-loaded Grand Slam!

In total we saw 4 home runs, each one accompanied by a wonderful rising feeling in the crowd that paralleled the arc of the ball above the field. Every time Ortiz came to the plate he was a threat to hit any meatball pitch out of the park. Every time Suzuki Ichiro readied to take a pitch we saw his methodical stance and alignment routine. We saw old men dancing with children, more than 6 pitchers between both teams (including a sidearm slinger), peanuts thrown by vendors with pinpoint accuracy and dozens of foul ball, each one accompanied by the wave of rising in the crowd as everyone stood with the expecation of catching the ball, being discovered on the jumbo screen, high fiving a neighbour they'd never met. I bought a game-day program and popcorn and took it all in. It was baseball - an arcane game mixed with high-tech showbiz production values and the romantic mythology of a simpler, imagined past - in all its effect. And it was great to see.

If you don't believe me, you can read the Duck's account of the whole thing on her newfangled blog, So Misguided.