Field of Magic, Baseball’s Superstitions, Curses and Taboos by John Cairney (review)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewed by: Field of Magic, Baseball's Superstitions, Curses and Taboos by John Cairney Lisa Alexander John Cairney. Field of Magic, Baseball's Superstitions, Curses and Taboos. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2023. 215 pp. Paperback, $29.95. Field of Magic, Baseball's Superstitions, Curses and Taboos is a self-explanatory title if ever there were one. Equal parts history and psychology rumination, John Cairney's book provides numerous examples of just how superstitious and sometimes illogical baseball players and fans can be about phenomena that cannot be objectively verified and asks whether baseball players and fans are more superstitious than those of other organized sports. Cairney divides his inquiry into four groupings: rituals, fetishes, curses, and taboos, and provides examples past and present of each. Rituals feel like the most well-known of the categories and can be individualized or collective in nature. We often see players crossing themselves before every at bat and, of course, fans sing "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" during the seventh inning stretch. At the same time, the story of players who urinated on their hands as part of their pregame ritual could best be described as interesting. Fetishes "refers to a person, animal, or object that has been ascribed supernatural powers and is viewed as a source of magic" (49). Most of us are already familiar with fetishes such as rabbit's feet, four-leaf clovers, and the Angels' rally monkey. In addition most teams have a mascot of some kind whose original role was to function as a good luck charm or fetish but today functions more as a master of ceremonies for ballpark entertainment. Cairney presents the history of human mascots such as Eddie Bennett (of the Yankees and White Sox), Little Ray Kelly (Yankees), and Nelson de la Rosa (Red Sox), which are less likely to appear in today's game. [End Page 116] The most fascinating chapter of the book brings to mind the Albert King blues classic "Born Under a Bad Sign." The depth and breadth of curses Cairney discusses in chapter three was surprising. Naturally the first two curses discussed in the chapter are the Curse of the Bambino and the Curse of the Billy Goat. The chapter goes on to debunk The Home Run Derby Curse, update us on the failed attempts to exorcise The Curse of Colonel Sanders (the Hanshin Tigers), the reversal of The Curse of William "Billy" Penn (Philadelphia), and explain the $50,000 the Yankees spent to dig up part of the foundation of the new Yankee Stadium to avert a curse from an impassioned Red Sox fan. Readers may or may not be surprised to learn that there are also multiple baseball curses attributed to Taylor Swift concerts. The entire chapter is a revelation. Chapter four deals with taboos or "prohibitions of behavior or beliefs [that if] broken, it can result in serious social sanctioning including disapproval, shunning, and even legal action" (119). One of the popular taboos is about pitchers throwing a no-hitter or perfect game. In many instances teammates will not talk to the pitcher and will segregate said pitcher in the dugout if the milestone is imminent. Pitchers typically won't speak about this while it's happening unless they're former White Sox pitcher Mark Buehrle who famously walked up to every teammate in the dugout and asked if they knew he was throwing a perfect game and a no-hitter (he achieved the former in 2007 and the latter in 2009). The most infamous taboos surround cheating and gambling. Cairney does not go into detail on this issue, which is understandable— there are entire books written on these topics; however, classifying cheating and gambling as "taboo" is a different spin, for sure. Several unwritten rules of the game make an appearance in this chapter, and though it is mentioned earlier in the chapter (Cairney acknowledges that many of the examples could exist in different sections of the book), Jose Bautista's epic bat flip is the most interesting example explored. In discussing Bautista versus the Texas Rangers, Cairney does parse out the fact that "hot dogging" may violate the unwritten rules taboo in the United States...
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.021 | 0.008 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".