Superstitious Royals fans and players conjure luck in mysterious ways

Michelle Pointer and her family had golden tickets — two seats in Kauffman Stadium for the Wild Card Game between the Royals and Oakland Athletics.

It was a dream outing for a family that started the season with the team at spring training in Arizona.

Then came the nightmarish moment when the Pointers, who live in Overland Park, realized that the Royals lost nine of the 10 home games they had gone to this season.

“If it’s a one-and-out kind of thing, maybe we should stay away,” a heavy-hearted Pointer told her husband.

So they sold their tickets and watched the game at the Power & Light District.

“We knew that if we went to that game and we lost, we were going to be upset,” said Pointer, 40.

Superstitious Royals fans are doing what they can to conjure luck in this magical season. They’re skipping haircuts, wearing different team shirts every day, avoiding the word “win” on Twitter and feverishly rearranging their baseball collections.

No surprise, the players are doing their part, too. Royals catcher Salvador Perez and shortstop Alcides Escobar are wearing Victoria’s Secret perfume on the field. Pitcher Greg Holland is said to be showering with exactly 13 pumps of body wash.

“Sometimes I blame myself if they lose,” said 23-year-old fan Cameron Madsen of North Kansas City. “This is the first time I’ve seen anything like this in my life, and I’m doing anything I can to help them win.”

So Madsen is willfully flouting social convention. Since the Wild Card Game on Sept. 30, he’s been wearing the same pair of navy blue dress socks he had on that night.

And no, he hasn’t washed them because, come on now, detergent would wash out the mojo.

“I was so superstitious about the magic that happened at Kauffman (that) Tuesday that I was scared to change anything at all but figured my socks were the key and the least noticeable daily hygiene infraction,” said Madsen, a technical recruiter for Midwest Consulting Group.

“When I played baseball in high school and would get on a winning streak, I wouldn’t change my socks. It seems to have worked for the Royals.”

Fellow fan J.B. Bremser is head chef at Oak 63 Bistro in Brookside, home to some major-league voodoo over the last few days. Two weeks ago on its Twitter page, the restaurant posted a photo of blue-and-white candles decorating one table with the words: “Superstition runs deep ’round here.”

On game days, Bremser wears a Royals ball cap instead of a traditional chef’s hat. He’s the reason employees tailgate together in the Kauffman parking lot on home-game Mondays.

When he actually attends games, he always stops at Arthur Bryant’s to buy a sandwich, just like the one he had in his hand when he watched his first Royals game at the old Municipal Stadium.

“When we really need to win a game, we go and buy a bunch of Arthur Bryant’s,” he said.

Bremser gladly sacrifices his own pleasure for the greater good. He was at the Wild Card Game, sitting 12 rows behind third base. But when the ninth inning ended in a tie he left the stadium, as he always does in tight games, and finished listening on his car radio.

He wound up celebrating by hugging some stranger in the parking lot.

Just kidding yourself?

In his 2004 book, “True Believers: The Tragic Inner Life of Sports Fans,” humorist Joe Queenan chronicled the lifelong heartache of rooting for Philadelphia’s sports teams.

Worried that he was letting his teams’ losses affect his mood and personal relationships, he went to a therapist. It didn’t help. But, oh, the irony — he couldn’t quit because the Phillies started winning when he started going.

Joseph Hallinan, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist (Cubs fan) and author of the new book “Kidding Ourselves: The Hidden Power of Self-Deception,” says nearly everyone has a little bit of superstition they hang on to.

For the players in the game, a little superstition actually makes a certain amount of sense.

Four years ago, a team of psychologists at the University of Cologne in Germany conducted an experiment with two groups of people who were given golf balls and told to putt with them. Researchers told one group that their golf balls were “lucky.”

“In other words,” Hallinan said, “they put a little superstition on it.”

The group with the “lucky” balls putted 35 percent more successfully than the other group.

“They found that when people come to believe that they actually have a good luck charm, an omen, whether it’s superstitious or not, it actually gives them confidence and that confidence translates into better performance,” said Hallinan, who writes a blog for Psychology Today.

Superstitious rituals of baseball players, he said, are almost always targeted toward that part of the game over which they have the least amount of control — when they bat.

“The fielding percentage for major league baseball teams in the United States is about 98 percent, sometimes close to 99 percent,” said Hallinan. “...The players feel, on defense anyway, pretty much in control.”

But on offense, not so much. The average batting average last season in Major League Baseball was .253, according to Baseball-Reference.com.

“So basically three out of four times, they fail,” said Hallinan. “In other words, they don’t have a lot of control. That’s when they turn to superstition.”

The examples are legendary. Wade Boggs of the Boston Red Sox, who is not Jewish, drew the Hebrew word for life, “chai,” in the dirt before every time at bat.

Jason Giambi, now with the Cleveland Indians, wore gold lame thongs to break hitting slumps. Chicago Cubs outfielder Moises Alou urinated on his hands before batting.

“It’s such a game of failure that you need something to cling on to to bust out of a slump or stay on a hot streak,” said lucky-sock guy Madsen, who first played baseball at age 5.

“Socks, I think many baseball players will tell you, are one of the most superstitious things you can have. When you get a good pair of socks that are working, you kind of ride those socks like a hot hand.

“They might be crusty, but a win overcomes the smell of anything.”

The tenth player

Jacqueline Hernandez of Shawnee believes that if the “Royals are losing it’s because I’m not cheering them on enough.”

So she wasn’t about to let an ocean stand in her way. Not after spending her entire life going to player autograph sessions, staying up late to watch games with her mom and spending her 30th birthday with her twin sister at spring training this year.

She was traveling in Spain on the day of the Wild Card game and watched it on her iPad using the MLB.tv app.

“I stayed up with my headphones on and watched the game in the darkness of my hotel room silently cheering them on for the win until 7 a.m.,” she said.

In her mind, her “boys in blue” could hear her cheering all the way from Madrid.

For fans like Hernandez, superstition is kind of a substitute for control, Hallinan said.

“You’ve got your good-luck socks on, or you’ve got your buddies over and everybody sits in their exact favorite chair and watches the game. Something like that makes you feel like at least you are somehow contributing to the effort.

“Are you really? No. The players can’t hear you cheer, but it makes you feel that you’ve somehow got a little control or input into the overall process.

“One part of their brain knows that it’s a bunch of hooey. But the other part that’s not so sure figures, ‘Well, there’s no real downside to it.’”

Chris Kelly feels like the 26th man on the rosterwith his pregame ritual. When the team started catching fire in the last few weeks of the season, he dug out an old Royals cap, a gameday giveaway from years ago.

“There’s a particular place on the couch that the hat has to sit until five minutes before game time, and then it goes on my head. It works, so I’m not going to change it,” said Kelly, 43, associate vice president for university marketing and communications at Pittsburg State University.

Sound silly? You bet.

And what of it?

“I think all fans are probably superstitious in some way,” said Kelly. “I think it has to do with the pace of baseball. It’s slower and it’s subtle and a little more thought goes into everything.

“You don’t really have anything to do with the outcome of the game, but it makes you feel part of it. You want to help these guys so much that you want to do everything you can.

“Especially with this team. You really want them to win.”

This story was originally published October 11, 2014 at 10:17 PM with the headline "Superstitious Royals fans and players conjure luck in mysterious ways."