Courtesy Baseball Hall of Fame

Wade Boggs hopes that eating chicken, among other curious practices, will help grease his way into the Hall of Fame.

Why is baseball such a hotbed of omen seekers? One answer is that it’s older than other major American sports and is enmeshed in folklore. The early player was generally uneducated and quick to embrace any possible remedy for poor fielding or a batting average that matched his weight. Putting a lady’s hair ribbon under his cap or a rabbit’s foot in his pocket seemed as sensible as, say, working to improve his fielding or batting style. Players kept photographs, four-leaf clovers, a box of crickets, even frilly women’s underwear in their lockers.

In the early days, to see a funeral procession on the day of a game was a bad omen, but one could reverse the curse by flipping a coin in the direction of the deceased. A cross-eyed woman in the grandstand presaged no hits that day, but the jinx would disappear if the player spit in her beer. It was a common practice to rub a batboy’s head for luck.

In the first two decades of this century, barrels played a mystic role in the lives of baseball players. In general they believed that if they saw a wagonload of barrels before a game, it meant good luck. New York Yankees owner Jacob Rupert had a beer wagon circle Yankee Stadium before games, with positive results.

New York Giants manager John McGraw once hired a “player” who couldn’t even play, because “old John” felt the man was a magnet for good fortune. McGraw would have him sit on the bench each day, in uniform, and tell him he was going to pitch that day. The man, Charles Victory Faust, finally did get to pitch one meaningless inning, to the delight of the crowd. The Giants won three consecutive pennants with their good-luck charm on the bench. Faust died before the 1914 season, and the favored Giants lost the pennant that year. (Historian Ken Burns reports that McGraw had another, less charming amulet: a piece of rope once used for a lynching.)