Sports jinxes are like opinions; everybody has one

By JIM LITKE / AP Sports Columnist

CHICAGO (AP) — Sports jinxes are like opinions.

Just about everybody has one.

We’re not talking about run-of-the-mill superstitions, like ballplayers turning their caps inside-out to conjure up late-inning rallies, or even wearing the same underwear day after day to extend a hot streak at the plate.

No, to qualify as a real jinx, somebody has to invest serious time and money to get out from under it, and invite serious clucking from the rest of a skeptical world, the way Thursday night’s ballyhooed obliteration of the “Bartman ball” has.

Such curses aren’t limited to Chicago or baseball, of course.

The so-called “Sports Illustrated cover jinx” — which the magazine claimed two years ago had resulted in “a demonstrable misfortune or decline in performance following a cover appearance roughly 37.2 percent of the time” — has felled more golfers and tennis players by far than any other group of athletes. And though the consequences are much less serious, appearing on the front of a Campbell’s Chunky Soup can in recent years has become the NFL equivalent of turning up on the side of a milk carton.

Still, nobody does curses better than baseball.

When he was running the Philadelphia Athletics at the turn of the last century, Hall of Fame baseball manager Connie Mack hoped to ward off a spell of bad luck by employing a hunchback named Louis Van Zelst as a mascot. For three years running.

And sometime this spring, in a bid to reverse the Curse of the Bambino, world-renowned salvage expert John Fish will troll the mile-long Willis Pond in Sudbury, Mass., in hopes of dredging up a piano that legend has it was put there by Babe Ruth in a fit of pique the year before he was traded to the Yankees.

“And this time,” said Eloise Newell, whose group has been behind two previous attempts, “we’ll either find the piano or run out of lake trying.”

Newell is the director of the Restoration Project, a rehabilitation program for adults with mental illness based in Sudbury, that hopes to use the publicity to shed some of the stigma attached to her cause. She may be a firm believer in science, but she is also a Red Sox fan.

“They’ve had some spectacular 11th-hour losses,” Newell said. “We believe a major component of success is to be able to visualize yourself crossing the finish line. And getting that piano out of the lake would remove one very big obstacle.”

Whether the destruction of the baseball that marked the beginning of the Cubs’ end in last season’s NL playoffs has the desired effect remains to be seen. But there’s no denying that the people behind it invested some serious time and expense.

Grant DePorter, who paid $113,824.16 for the ball at a December auction on behalf of Harry Caray’s Restaurant Group, has lined up three hours of music, comedy and celebrity appearances leading up to the climactic event. Its end will be choreographed by Michael Lantieri, a die-hard Cubs fan and Oscar winner who wrecks things for a living and has worked on such movies as “Jurassic Park.”

Lest anybody feel too sorry for the baseball, know that it spent Wednesday touring the city and Wrigley Field one last time, then retired to a hotel suite where a last supper of steak, lobster and an ice-cold Bud was set out. But there was no chance of a last-second reprieve.

“What would happen if we didn’t destroy it and some Marlins’ fan got a hold of it?” DePorter said. “What if someone used it to psych out the Cubs next year? No, it’s got to go.”

A rational man might pose the same question, consider the time and expense already invested, and arrive at a completely different answer. But that’s almost beside the point.

Cubs and Red Sox fans — and everybody else who’s ever believed in a curse — already know there are perfectly reasonable explanations for why things turn out the way they do. Statisticians explain away the centurylong championship droughts experienced by both ballclubs in terms of probability, and psychologists view repeated failures to deliver in the clutch as nothing more mystical than a very human failure to deal with pressure and the burden of heightened expectations.

What’s easy to forget the longer such droughts continue is a very basic fact. Success in any endeavor, no matter how often or how little it graces a particular athlete or team, is the exception rather than the norm. Winning is, and always will be, a happy confluence of talent, timing and luck.

An entire metropolis will ignore those verities for at least one more night, but it’s a sign of progress that nothing more important than a baseball will be sacrificed to provide peace of mind. Besides, sooner or later, those fans will have to face up to the reality laid out by one local columnist who pleaded for the ball to be spared:

“If the glove doesn’t fit, you have to acquit.”

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Jim Litke is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at jlitke@ap.org