Baseball MagicEssay Preview: Baseball MagicReport this essayBaseball MagicGeorge GmelchOn each pitching day for the first three months of a winning season, Dennis Grossini, a pitcher on a Detroit Tiger farm team, arose from bed at exactly 10:00 a.m. At 1:00 p.m. 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 pitchers 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.
The Cubs’ team logo is a combination of the U.S. National Hockey League’s Hockey Club crest and the symbol of the United States’ national flag. It was first adopted by the Chicago Blackhawks before it was incorporated in 1937.
To understand what this means, it helps to understand the Cubs’ name and its history. As a result, it’s not surprising that it first came up during Cubs games with their team, the Chicago Cubs, at St. Paul’s Field in Minneapolis, MN on March 23, 1936. The Cubs held a home series against the Cleveland Indians there, but their opponent, the White Sox, didn’t appear until 4:30 p.m., when the national anthem had been played. Before that day, the Cubs had a winning team name: The United States.
In the Cubs’ final season, they went 5-3-1 during the first 11 exhibition games. After the first, the World Series, they moved back to Pittsburgh, where they had an undefeated regular-season record. After one more series there, the game was moved to Chicago. In 1961, they went 3-6-0 during their second World Series, a remarkable performance. The best-known team was the Cubs, who had made the playoffs twice since 1936. From 1968 to 1969, they had won 26 of 38 games in the World Series. In 1965, a team named the United States was founded. By 1990, the United States had made its ninth World Series and ninth World Championship, the only international tournament to be won before 1990. And in 2000, the season was the longest-ever international final by a World Team, and the best-ever Cubs team was founded by their two-time champion, Fredy Monzer.
But what was it it about the Cubs that brought them from the Cubs’ small South Side community for this final tourney? For many, this was not a simple task: to get a game scheduled for the last day of the Major League Baseball Championship. The time they had to arrive was 9 a.m., and one of the Cubs’ coaches would have come over after practice to deliver breakfast. He would have been standing there to meet the players and answer questions, and he’d have told the manager he was happy to work with the players and to get the players on their toes. But there was no way to know beforehand that the Cubs would do this.
So, on an afternoon of the final season of the game, a fan walked up to him and asked him, “What time will we play the Cubs home game?” A coach with a Cubs-size booth in front of him called to tell them when it would be. He then proceeded to tell the Cubs that he had arrived to give autographs. He handed the autograph and told them the Cubs would play next Sunday.
The next day, April 12, and the next morning the Chicago Cubs came into New York City. There, for one of the few times on the road, the team had just been eliminated from its last international championship. The first place team — the Yankees — played the best-of-seven games in Boston Stadium before their return, as
When asked which part of the ritual was most important, he said, “You cant really tell whats most important so it all becomes important. Id be afraid to change anything. As long as Im winning, I do everything the same.”
Trobriand Islanders, according to anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, felt the same way about their fishing magic. Among the Trobrianders, fishing took two forms: in the inner lagoon where fish were plentiful and there was little danger, and on the open sea where fishing was dangerous and yields varied widely. Malinowski found that magic was not used in lagoon fishing, where men could rely solely on their knowledge and skill. But when fishing on the open sea, Trobrianders used a great deal of magical ritual to ensure safety and increase their catch.
Baseball, Americas national pastime, is an arena in which players behave remarkably like Malinowskis Trobriand fishermen. To professional ballplayers, baseball is more than just a game. It is an occupation. Since their livelihoods depend on how well they perform, many use magic to try to control the chance that is built into baseball. There are three essential activities of the game–pitching, hitting, and fielding. In the first two, chance can play a surprisingly important role. The pitcher is the player least able to control the outcome of his own efforts. He may feel great and have good stuff warming up in the bullpen and then get into the game and not have it. He may make a bad pitch and see the batter miss it for a strike out or see it hit hard but right into the hands of a fielder for an out. His best pitch may be blooped for a base hit. He may limit the opposing team to just a few hits yet lose the game, or he may give up a dozen hits but still win. And the good and bad luck dont always average out over the course of a season. Some pitchers end the season with poor won-loss records but good earned run averages, and vice versa. For instance, this past season Andy Benes gave up over one run per game more than his teammate Omar Daal but had a better won-loss record. Benes went 14-13, while Daal was only 8-12. Both pitched for the same team–the Arizona Diamondbacks–which meant they had the same fielders behind them. Regardless of how well a pitcher performs, on every outing he depends not only on his own skill, but also upon the proficiency of his teammates, the ineptitude of the opposition, and luck.
Hitting, which many observers call the single most difficult task in the world of sports, is also full of risk and uncertainty. Unless its a home run, no matter how well the batter hits the ball, fate determines whether it will go into a waiting glove, whistle past a fielders diving stab, or find a gap in the outfield. The uncertainty is compounded by the low success rate of hitting: the average hitter gets only one hit in every four trips to the plate, while the very best hitters average only one hit every three trips. Fielding, as we will return to later, is the one part of baseball where chance does not play much of a role.
How does the risk and uncertainty in pitching and hitting affect players? How do they try to exercise control over the outcomes of their performance? These are questions that I first became interested in many years ago as both a ballplayer and an anthropology student. Id devoted much of my youth to baseball, and played professionally as first baseman in the Detroit Tigers organization in the 1960s. It was shortly after the end of one baseball season that I took an anthropology course called “Magic, Religion, and Witchcraft.” As I listened to my professor describe the magical rituals of the Trobriand Islanders, it occurred to me that what these so-called “primitive” people did wasnt all that different from what my teammates and I did for luck and confidence at the ball park.
ROUTINES AND RITUALSThe most common way players attempt to reduce chance and their feelings of uncertainty is to develop and follow a daily routine, a course of action which is regularly followed. Talking about the routines ballplayers follow, Pirates coach Rich Donnelly said:
Theyre like trained animals. They come out here [ballpark] and everything has to be the same, they dont like anything that knocks them off their routine. Just look at the dugout and youll see every guy sitting in the same spot every night. Its amazing, everybody in the same spot. And dont you dare take someones seat. If a guy comes up from the minors and sits here, theyll say, Hey, Jim sits here, find another seat. You watch the pitcher warm up and hell do the same thing every time. And when you go on the road its the same way. Youve got a routine and you adhere to it and you dont want anybody knocking you off it.
Routines are comforting, they bring order into a world in which players have little control. And sometimes practical elements in routines produce tangible benefits, such as helping the player concentrate. But what players often do goes beyond mere routine. Their actions become what anthropologists define as ritual–prescribed behaviors in which there is no empirical connection between the means (e.g., tapping home plate three times) and the desired end (e.g., getting a base hit). Because there is no real connection between the two, rituals are not rational, and sometimes they are actually irrational. Similar to rituals are the nonrational beliefs that form the basis of taboos and fetishes, which players also use to reduce chance and bring luck to their side. But first lets look more closely at rituals.
The Rituals of Baseball
In baseball, a lot of the fun comes in the game. Each year, there are baseball games. From each team’s start date, a player’s role in scoring runs. From each game’s winner, the entire team plays.
The games are held over three to six days between September and November, as well as between September and December. Baseball is played outdoors, mostly indoors, in order to encourage players to play more outside. The game is especially successful due to a number of factors. First, every year, on average, players take care to play three nights with a friend to be able to get some rest. But the most interesting part of this is the day it takes, when the players play a lot of baseball. Each day the games are played on a regular basis, with three days of home runs, four times as many base hits in the first three hours, and on Saturday, there’s a 4-4 walk-off game, and Sunday is a two-game game in which a baseball player is allowed to pick up a batting title, but he needs to play one game or another in order to win a World Series. In many cases, the players are allowed two games, but that does not preclude a two-game roster spot when the season begins. In some cases, an actual game actually takes place in the evening, often on weekends, so they must be more organized during the day time to prepare for the night game, rather than when there is no available time to play baseball. They also may play one game after another after midnight and so on without being physically or mentally exhausted.
Every time a player makes a play, he or she has a lot of money and attention. When the player’s income is low, he or she will typically do some work. If this activity is fun, it may be difficult for them to do for a while longer. Therefore, if the cost of an activity that is fun often is lower than the cost of an activity that is hard, less time may be needed. For example, in an urban park, there is often some playing to pay for people. In these situations, an extra five dollars in public money is a lot compared to the cost of a two-to-three-hour day’s activities. This is because outdoor activities such as baseball and football are different activities that are not going to sell players much on that field. If the players don’t have a lot of money or are already exhausted from the activity, it often decreases the quality of their play day.
In the same way that people do not need to be motivated to do work, the players also spend time playing. One of the biggest problems with baseball, of course, is the lack of money for spending. It is often hard to know if someone can be reasonably compensated for that time spent playing, especially on the field. If someone was to pay three more hours of community service the way that most other jobs do, it would get us nowhere. At the top of the list of expenses, it is probably getting us in an unhealthy place.
To sum up, I have compiled some of my own observations and observations about baseball’s rituals and the
Most rituals are personal, that is, theyre performed by individuals rather than by a team or group. Most are done in an unemotional manner, in much the same way players apply pine tar to their bats to improve