THE MAGICAL GAME

Uncanny events at the ballpark.

Baird, a journalist and “superstitious Mets fan,” pens an entertaining paean to baseball’s “illogical and un-algorithmizable” elements. She’s sharp on the relationship between players’ idiosyncratic rituals and demanding schedules. Her analysis of purportedly hexed teams is brisk and rational. And she’s infectiously enthusiastic about the sport’s quirky personalities and colorful superstitions. Players talk to and sleep with bats, take daily batting practice at precisely 17 minutes after the hour, and wear fancy undergarments to halt slumps. Baseball lifers tell Baird that these behaviors are efforts to establish “some form of routine” during a long season. Though her overview of “cursed” ballclubs—those that endured long spells without championships after terrible trades or fan-related controversies—inevitably covers familiar ground, it’s augmented by a wacky, little-known yarn about a Japanese team and a stolen statute of KFC’s Colonel Sanders. Scrutinizing the cursed clubs’ personnel moves, she shows that such longtime losers weren’t jinxed—they were poorly run. An expansive interpretation of baseball “as a vessel for touching the magic of life itself” informs Baird’s inclusion of entirely explicable events, among them a surprise home run and the work behind a TV broadcast. She conducts a delightful interview with a woman who worried it was unlucky to leave her seat during a no-hitter, ultimately wetting her pants. But there are missteps in Baird’s analysis, among them a hackneyed comparison of baseball and The Odyssey, and a suspect explanation of how a spitball works. Likewise, little is gained from her chat with an astrologer who “believes that some people are simply born lucky while others are not” and hypothesizes that teams might benefit from “the golden energy” of a player who distributes water to teammates.

A fun, mostly effective survey of the national pastime’s unusual customs and sustaining myths.