The Magical Game:
The Spirit and History of
Baseball’s Superstitions, Rituals, and Curses
The author: Addy Baird
The details: St. Martin’s Press/MacMillian, 304 pages, $29, released June 2, ‘26
The links: The publisher, the author, Bookshop.org
A review in 90 feet or less:
Eric Poulin’s recent Facebook post made us feel kinda icky, as much as the game was doing that to his own psyche.
It’s an interesting choice of words for someone who came out in 2025 with a book, “Here Comes the Pizzer: The Found Poetry of Baseball Broadcasts,” which caught our review series.
Poulin wasn’t finding it — no poetic justice in some of the things around the ball diamonds of an America charging into its 250th birthday celebration. If baseball holds a mirror up to the country, both might be in need of some magical cleansing.
Poulin wrote this before more of the latest missteps made at various MLB pride nights — specifically by players. It’s almost poetic that in his mentioning the Cubs’ PCA, who had already alienated the Los Angeles Dodgers’ fan base he grew up with, now finds him honored this week at Wrigley Field:
Comments to Poulin’s original post included:
== Bruce McClure, recently elected to the board of directors for the Society of American Baseball and the longtime SABR chair covering Maine and New Hampshire: “It’s inevitable that this de-evolution of American culture (and dare I say behavior) spill over into our great game. Baseball is so closely associated with our culture and fabric that the seeming nastiness of our daily lives has infiltrated major league stadia across the country. … With a little work, I can get around the $%^& that we are subject to nearly 24/7. … Eric, you’re spot on here.”
== Scott Lawson Pomeroy, a singer, guitarist and song writer from Hartford, Conn.: “Politically Correct currently means Woke to the majority of men today, and so the pushback against that is what the rest of the world views as the Ugly American. … I’m pretty grossed out by how over the top toxic the energy is these days too.”
== Jason Cost of Hickory, N.C.: “Saddest part is that the season may be the last we get for awhile with the imminent lockout.”
Yeah, there’s that, too.
As Eddie Brown wrote for the San Diego Union-Tribune: “Baseball is about to argue over payroll inequality while the rest of the country argues over rent, groceries, wages and gas prices. … Baseball keeps acting like nostalgia can (fix things). It can’t. Nostalgia is what you sell when the present stinks.” As Jim Bowden wrote for The Athletic: “The game is in a great place — embrace it, grow it and don’t ruin it” with a work stoppage.
My angst centers more on tweaks the game’s gatekeepers thrust into the flow, deciding things still needed to be sped up in concert with creating a product as perfect as possible.
Clocks and video-generated challenges seem necessary for half-hour TV game shows created by LeBron James’ friends. Not for baseball.
My perfectly cynical mindset sees these two elements merging the game’s psychology with its business functioning. Speeding up the action sure feels like it’s trying to keep up with the fever pitch of those now gambling legally on it. Instant gratification and impulsive wagering have no time for lulls. The waiting was the hardest part between what the next prediction prop bet comes up on the screen. It’s why we apparently also need to make sure a bang-bang play at first or a slide at second has no human element mucking things up. The betters need to know the game is trying to be as auto-correct as possible. No one wants to lose money based on an umpire’s eyesight.
If a pitched ball is less than 0.1 of an inch outside the imaginary batters’ box, and that technology is then displayed up on a scoreboard for 50,000 to anticipate a verdict, what’s to stop someone from placing another bet on what that outcome will be?
The questions fester: Has baseball’s aura been hijacked and misappropriated? Has its charm of imperfection been contaminated and reconstituted to fit the needs of financial, political or other outside forces that clash with communal pleasure? Have bookies and the sharps interrupted our pure, timeless enjoyment.
If there is indeed a growing enshittification of baseball, has it been maxed out, perhaps, by a misguided hex?
We want to exclaim: Did you see Ohtani did last night? Is he some kind of wizard?
And then you see what MLB’s capitalists do to authenticate anything remotely related to it. How cruel.
This current world of like, follow and subscribe leads us to verify the words of Addy Baird, a Salt Lake Tribune political reporter, New York Mets fan and self-assigned astrologer who has had these same questions and tries to align them with her own cosmic choreography of how the game brings her enjoyment.
She signs off on Chapter 8, “The Death of Magic,” with the reminder: “An unchanging thing is a dead thing.” It’s her fortune cookie response to spending the previous 30 pages wrestling with her own angst over the game’s re-calibration, which included better defining infield defensive shifts, larger bases and all those other clockings. It’s along the lines of what Jane Leavy nailed to the MLB front door with her “Make Me The Commissioner” petition. The church of baseball can’t be selling its sacred indulgences.
This is the break out part of Baird’s current events section.
She finds so many instances going back to the 1800s when writers were handwringing over baseball’s changes. She finds a fabulous Bill James’ line: “Until 1945, baseball did have a clock. It was called the sun.”
He also wrote in 2024: “The vast proliferation of (and fascination with) small measurements (exit velocity, pitch counts, pitch movement, launch angles, etc.) represents not the success of sabermetrics, but its failure. We have fallen back into details. It’s like our clothes have been caught in the machinery.”
Reformation and enlightenment and adversity and people’s schedules have brought us to this moment, and maybe the magic is more nostalgia in our minds … and just what is nostalgia? Baird does a fabulous job of explaining that word’s origin and how it’s been twisted a bit. She also extracts, on page 223, how the MLB rulebook since 1901 had this: “The umpire shall call a ball on the pitcher each time he delays the game by failing to deliver the ball to the batsman for a longer period of 20 seconds.”
The rule had simply been unenforced. It was there to make sure the game was fun. It had “an excitement and vim about it.”
We do as well after soaking all this in.
A day before her book’s official launch, she wrote a piece for the Trib that led off with a conversation she had in 2024 with former Angels pitcher Clyde Wright, trying to pick his mind as to whether or not the franchise he played for in Anaheim was, well, just plain doomed.
“It was a winding and special conversation, and it became one of my favorites among the dozens of interviews I did for my new book,” she wrote.
Wright’s conversation is embedded the start of Chapter 3 titled “The Jinx,” when he discusses how teammates tend to act goofy when a pitcher is in the middle of crafting a no-hit bid — which Wright succeeded with on July 3, 1970 against Oakland before just 12,000 on a Friday night in Anaheim. It makes one think how, 45 years later, the same sort of incredible thing could happen with just as few fans on a Fourth of July weekend.
As much as Wright added to this jinx discussion, we’re reminded of a spot-on assessment Vin Scully gave in a 1960 story that ran in the Los Angeles Times: “It’s insulting the listeners to make them think they’re silly and superstitious enough to believe my telling them that a no-hitter is going will affect the game. You see, no one expects a listener to hang on to every word for three hours. They leave the radio from time to time and this service must be rendered.”
Scully, who called three perfect games among his 20 no-hitters, as well as many that were spoiled late, absorbed that philosophy from Red Barber, who Baird quotes from his 1993 book saying: “This hoodoo business started in the dugouts with a fairly reasonable premise — fear of putting undue pressure on his pitcher, who just might be blissfully unaware … Then, before the radio came along, this hoodoo, or jinx, got up in the press box … it spread into the broadcasting booths. Not mine.”
Wright could have added to the discussion about this long-held belief that the Angels are a cursed franchise.
As pointed out in the Chapter 5 titled “Cursed,” Baird introduces how a Los Angeles County Supervisor, in the summer of 1968, appointed Louise Huebner as the world’s first “official witch.” Our own search produced a story explaining how Supervisor Ernest Debs designated Huebner as the “Official Sorceress … by virture of her supernatural powers.” She had incidentally been doing a radio show on KLAC-AM (570), owned by Gene Autry, who also owned the Angels (which Baird didn’t seem to realize or make that connection her book). Baird is troubled by how many active players in team history, or those who’ve been part of the organization, have had tragic fates — the death of pitchers Dick Wantz (1965), Bruce Heinbechner (1974), Nick Adenhardt (2009) and Tyler Skaggs (2019), shortstop Mike Miley (1977) and outfielder Lyman Bostock (1978). Add the suicide of relief pitcher Donnie Moore (1989). Plus freak injuries suffered by Minnie Rojas, Bobby Valentine, Kent Mercker or Kendrys Morales.
“In the face of all this tragedy, it seems undeniable that the Angels have angered the baseball gods,” Baird writes, “and yet so much about why the apparent curse exists and how to end it remains murky.”
The most circulated story is Anaheim Stadium was built on an ancient Native American burial ground inhabited by the Acjacheman tribe, who congregated along the Santa Ana River, which runs beyond right field at the ballpark.
“There was no written documentation that anything was discovered during the excavation for the stadium,” Baird quotes Anaheim Public Library heritage services manager Jane Newell about the plot of land that now borders State College, Katella and Orangewood next to the 57 Orange Freeway.
Baird may stumbled onto Huebner because a 2000 book called “The Baseball Astrologer (And Other Weird Tales),” by John Holway, which pulled her into this discussion of Angels messiness. Holway, a prolific baseball writer whose work could justifiably be admired for its volume, got only 2.6 stars out of a possible five, spread out by just five raters, for his “Baseball Astrologer” on Goodreads.com. Not real good ratings halo.
Baird, amidst her fluid and reader-journey prose, also can’t help but bring up the time in 2024 when the Angels’ organization — from the lowest minor-league team up through its Anaheim residency — was in last place in their leagues. She should know: The Angels’ top farm team has been buzzing around in her Salt Lake City neighborhood, a team that once was known as the Pacific Coast League’s Hollywood Stars.
“Yes, the Angels, too, apparently suffer the Curse of Bad Management, which explains a lot about the decades of on-field mess,” Baird admits, alluding as well to the eventual departure of Shohei Ohtani. “I think a curse also offers us a strange thread of reason when we are forced to reckon with the unthinkable, and Angels fans need that more than most: Years of losing baseball is one thing; years of losing lives is another,” Baird stamps on page 134. “That baseball is a microcosm of life is the oldest cliche in the baseball book, but it’s become cliche because it’s true. Life is often tragic without explanation — unfair, unfun, uncertain and uncontrollable. So, too, is baseball. What could be more cursed?”
Baird’s message in the bottle comes in her “Coming Home” chapter, in how baseball “can act as a vessel for touch the magic of life itself.” Just realize that “rituals, jinxes, curses, hexes, spells, hoodoos, all of them are an attempt to harness the larger forces of magic, but the are not ‘magic’ itself … baseball is a portal to a magical realm in the most literal sense … baseball rewards devotion …”
Namaste.
How it goes in the scorebook:
Harmonic conversion.
There’s a beach chair waiting for anyone who heads up Highway 101 to the community of Cayucos, a magical place we don’t mind sharing now that we’ve experienced it. It can’t be possibly overrun with tourists. It’s too cool. The city name comes from a South American dugout canoe. Kayak fishing in and around the all-wood pier is encouraged.
The place is due south of another tiny town called Harmony, which embraces a highway marker standing as a 101 turnoff do some glass blowing, spin a pottery wheel, chill on some herbal local tea, and gently blow on some dandy dandelions.
Is there really just 18 residents? “More or less,” said the wine pourer at Harmony Cellars Winery.
From the Spectrum cable service in that neck of the woods, Dodgers and Angels games are made available, plus the MLB Network.
“The Magical Game” provided a mental vacation as well during this time of a 65th birthday excursion. Especially reading the book, looking up occasionally, and watching a couple kids play Whiffleball on the shoreline. Over at Ducky’s, the local seafood place, a couple of women walked in as we started in on clam chowder. One was wearing a rainbow Dodgers’ Pride Hat logo cap. The pair had been at Dodger Stadium the night before and were heading home.
As Baird writes on page 3: “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.”
That’s the allegory of baseball we try to sometimes push aside.
We’ve had our day in the sun (when sunscreen wasn’t necessary), nights of firework displays (now replaced by drone shows) and lagtimes in the parking lots trying to be as cordial as possible when letting someone else into a lane of traffic versus fending off those who seem to be on their own special cutting-off speed journey of aggression trying to sneak in up a the bottleneck — because they can, since one in every three drivers are often buried in a cellphone trance and not paying attention to the spaces created.
Maybe this book will be a cursed blessing. If there is a 2027 work stoppage, this gives the masses something to re-read. Which implies: Read it now and store away the chapters in your soul.
Rick Monday said on a recent a Dodgers’ radio broadcast: “I always believed superstitions were bad luck.”
If only we had the foresight to flag this book as No. 13 in the 2026 review list …
More to followup:
== My own Clyde Wright bad karma story: I was in an Angels charity golf event several years ago and Wright was in my group. As we approached the final holes of Strawberry Farms Golf Club in Irvine — 16, 17 and 18 border a large lake, as designed by owner and former Angel Doug DeCinces — Wright explained how after a round there, he was so upset he missed his final putt that he took his bag off the back of the cart and tossed it in the water. It eventually dawned him during the 19th hole that he couldn’t leave the course because his car keys were in that bag. A course attendant fished them out.
== Other books on our shelves that somewhat take this idea into various side trips and are mention in Baird’s work:
“Field of Magic: Baseball’s Superstitions, Curses and Taboos,” by John Cairney (2023)
“Infinite Baseball: Notes from a Philosopher at the Ballpark,” by Alva Noe (2019) with our review
“The Utility of Boredom: Baseball Essays,” by Andrew Forbes (2016)
“Haunted Baseball: Ghosts, Curses, Legends, And Eerie Events,” by Mickey Bradley (2007)
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