The Magical Game: A Guest Post by Addy Baird

Tracing baseball’s superstitious beginnings to the beliefs fans and players continue to follow today, this is a deep dive into the history of baseball that doesn’t usually make newspaper headlines. Read on for an exclusive essay from author Addy Baird on writing The Magical Game. 

After covering a global pandemic, a series of mass shootings and two presidential impeachments in less than two years, I was burnt out.

I left my job at BuzzFeed News and decided I wanted to pursue my lifelong dream of writing a book, and I started calling author friends looking for advice on where to begin.

One told me that the most important thing about writing a book was picking a topic I really loved, given how much time I would be spending on it, and I considered what I loved enough to dedicate four years of my life to. The answer was simple: baseball magic.

I have always loved magic (astrology, tarot cards, gardening), but I’m a converted baseball fan. After I fell in love with the game in college, I discovered these two interests had a surprising overlap: The game was riddled with superstitions, magical rituals, spells, a grand mythology.

The Magical Game emerged from that overlap. It is constructed like a baseball game — nine chapters, nine innings — and each considers a different form of magic in the game, including jinxes, fan magic, curses and luck.

I learned so much about the game and its history over the process of researching, reporting and writing the book, but perhaps my favorite was a look at baseball’s mythology: Chapter seven of the book explores some of baseball’s canon myths, including its invention by Civil War hero Abner Doubleday and Babe Ruth’s called shot.

These myths serve to tell a magical story about baseball, but the mythology goes even deeper; it’s embedded in the game itself. The structure of a baseball game mirrors that of the Odyssey — it is the hero’s journey playing out on the baseball diamond.

“First, our hero faces a call to action. He stands at home, takes his at-bat. He will strike out, either literally or figuratively, sitting back down or, if he can answer the call, setting out on an adventure that will take him far from home. That journey into the unknown begins 90 feet down the first baseline,” I write in the book’s seventh chapter. “Along the way, he might even have an unexpected encounter with magic, with fate, with God. If he can survive, he will come back different. His ultimate victory is coming home.”