Superstitions Important to Many Players

The Baltimore Orioles wear black stirrups instead of orange . . . and win a game. Slugger Mickey Tettleton puts on a Dick Tracy T-shirt . . . and breaks out of a slump. Relief pitchers pose Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle figures, hop over white foul lines or sing on the mound . . . and save games.

Coincidence? You decide.

Baseball players have long been a superstitious lot. And who are the Orioles to mess with tradition, especially when they’re having an on-again, off-again season like this year?

“I think everyone believes in their own way,” Tettleton says with a smile that barely cracks a jaw as square as Dick Tracy’s own.

Tettleton gave an inadvertent boost to the big upcoming flick by letting on that he was wearing a Dick Tracy T-shirt under his uniform when he recently emerged from a frustrating slump at the plate.

“I got it in the mail, I don’t even know where it came from,” he demurs.

Tettleton probably isn’t the most superstitious Oriole -- despite his current streak, he hasn’t even decided whether to keep wearing the T-shirt. But he’s the most highly publicized one when the subject comes up. During a hot streak last year, for example, it was Froot Loops: His wife revealed that the cereal was the breakfast of this particular champion, and a legend was born.

“You play so many games,” the catcher says with a shrug, “more than anything, this sort of thing breaks the routine.”

Athletes, and baseball players in particular, can be more prone to superstitions than the rest of us, experts say.

“There is such an element of chance in baseball, it makes it vulnerable to magical thinking,” says Jim McGee, the Orioles’ former team psychologist. “And there may be the sense that baseball, compared to other sports, is extraordinarily traditional. They still do things in 1990 that they did in 1890.”

And who’s to argue with someone like Joe Orsulak? His team-leading batting average -- for the third straight year -- lends credibility to his particular superstition.

“I don’t like pitchers touching my bat. It’s bad luck,” says the outfielder. “I won’t use it if a pitcher’s touched it.”

Orsulak also has used a sort of personal voodoo to psyche out a pitcher who has caused him difficulty in the past: He wore a T-shirt with the pitcher’s name and face on it the next time he had to face him.

“I got hits off him,” he reports.

But certainly the most superstitious player award on the team goes to Brian Holton. Hey kids, you, too, can be a major league relief pitcher! Clip and save:

“I get dressed the same way every day. Then I button just three buttons of my warm-up jacket. I go and get a towel and wrap it around my neck, and the tag always has to be on the right side,” Holton says. “I put two cans of Copenhagen (smokeless tobacco product) in my pocket, one from spring training and a new one. In my left pocket I carry a lasso.

“I always sit in the same seat in the bullpen and in the dugout,” he continues. “I come up on the mound from the first base side. I wipe the (pitching) rubber four times with each leg and spin around clockwise. I catch the ball with one foot on the dirt and one foot on the grass. I never change catchers. If he’s not ready (after batting in the last inning), I wait for him, I don’t throw to anyone else.

“I always sing on the mound to myself, whatever they’re playing,” Holton adds. “If they’re not playing anything, I’ll sing, ‘You take the high road, I’ll take the low road.”’

Holton says he started this routine as a 10-year-old (hmmm, perhaps not the part about the tobacco) and sees it more as a way to relax himself rather than to soothe the gods.

Relief pitchers, said McGee, who was team psychologist from 1980 to 1986, may need such rituals more than other players because of the unique nature of their roles.

“Their tension level is always high, they can’t tell when they’re going in,” he says. “If they don’t perform their rituals, they feel anxious.”

McGee likens ritualistic superstitions to a behavior observed in animals.

“There’s a naturally occurring form of superstitious behavior in animals. Take a little dog who every time he hears a big noisy truck runs to the same part of the back yard and starts to dig madly,” McGee says. “The dog isn’t digging because it thinks the truck will go away if it digs a hole. It’s digging to avoid anxiety.”

McGee says superstitions have such a hold on us because, every once in a while, they “work.” Actually, a lot of times they don’t work, but you remember the payoffs rather than all the other times, he says.

“The longer you go without a payoff, the more you think it must be right around the corner,” McGee said. “So, ironically, the longer you go without the superstition being reinforced, the more powerful the superstition becomes.”

Either that, or you try a new one.

“I’ve been switching batting gloves, wrist bands, changing bats. Nothing’s really working,” first baseman Randy Milligan says with a laugh. “I just keep doing things till it clicks.”

Some baseball superstitions, though, are immutable -- don’t jinx a no-hitter by saying one’s in progress. And watch the lines!

“The one thing I don’t do is step on the white lines,” says relief pitcher Mark Williamson of this commonly held superstition. “I just never have.”

And other superstitions are quite idiosyncratic -- probably no one in the majors besides Rene Gonzales tucks his glove in a Wonder Bread bag.

“That goes back a long way, to my first year of college when a coach called me ‘Wonder Bread’ because my defense had no holes. That was when there was that ad, ‘Wonder Bread, it has no holes,”’ the infielder says.

There are some legendarily superstitious baseball players elsewhere -- the Boston Red Sox’s Wade Boggs, for example, has a host of superstitions ranging from eating chicken to running sprints to, yes, road-trip girlfriend Margo Adams’ underwear or lack thereof.

Which could be why Brady Anderson, the Oriole outfielder who came up through the Red Sox farm system, has his unique superstition.

“My superstition is not to have any superstitions,” Anderson says. “I don’t want to get any started.”