Players and skippers are better educated today than in decades past; most have some college education. Former White Sox and Athletics and current Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa is one of baseball’s “new breed” of managers, bright, articulate, and the possessor of a law degree. He has a computer in the dugout to keep track of opposing players.

Yet, in 1982, LaRussa was wearing his heaviest jacket during a chilly mid-summer night game against Boston, and his White Sox won. So the woolen-lined jacket became a fixture for the next three weeks, even when the temperature exceeded ninety degrees. “We went 15-3 after I started wearing it,” Tony recalls. “That jacket helped, and so did my scruffed cap. I wore the cap for home games, and we won seventeen straight.”

Sometimes the apparel is an amulet: Scott Erickson chose to wear black on a pitching day, “The Day of Death”; John Smoltz adopted a Notre Dame T-shirt, played Nintendo baseball before home assignments, and persuaded his psychologist to wear something red for luck (some psychologist!); Walt Weiss wore the same white North Carolina wrestling T-shirt and a left sock with a hole in it when things were going well. Home run champ Mark McGuire puts his uniform on in the same exact order, from bottom to top. He always steps out of the clubhouse right foot first for batting practice and returns to it left foot first.

Marge Schott, the feisty Cincinnati Reds owner, carried a plastic bag containing clumps of hair from her deceased dog, Schottzie. Before a 1995 game she rubbed some of the hair on players’ chests and legs for luck, and she later put the hair in their uniform pockets. She also sought magic results by rubbing the chest hair of manager Lou Pinella every day.

It must not have worked; Schott was eventually suspended for conduct detrimental to the game.Will the superstitious ways survive? Almost certainly. As with most sports, to be played well, baseball requires intense concentration, study, and almost endless practice and repetitions; it’s a game of the mind. As baseball’s philosopher-king, Yogi Berra, so succinctly phrased it, “90 percent of this game is half mental.”

And with the multimillion-dollar stakes of the game still rising, who wouldn’t use superstition to hedge his bets?