In terms of career impact, outfielder Kevin Rhomberg barely caused a ripple in the majors, during which he appeared in a grand total of 41 games for the Cleveland Indians in the early 1980s.
Oh, Rhomberg racked up a sweet average of .383 (18-for-47), which will always look fabulous in the Baseball Encyclopedia.
But when it comes to the teeming world of baseball superstitions, Rhomberg was Rogers Hornsby, Willie Mays and Babe Ruth rolled into one–the Rajah of Rituals, the Say Hex Kid, the Sultan of Spells.
If the commissioner ever commissions a Mt. Rushmore of obsessively superstitious ballplayers, there will have to be a spot on the mountain (complete with lucky T-shirt made of granite) for Rhomberg, right alongside idiosyncratic icons Wade Boggs, Turk Wendell and Larry Walker.
Just ask Dan Rohn, the Seattle Mariners’ Triple-A manager in Tacoma, about Rhomberg. The player’s signature superstition, foremost on a long and varied list, was the need to touch back someone who had just touched him.
If a person somehow eluded his return touch, Rhomberg would send a letter that said, “This constitutes a touch.”
Teammates, having ballplayers’ playfully sadistic sensibilities, loved nothing more than to touch him and then run off, sending Rhomberg into a near panic.
Rick Sutcliffe once reached under a bathroom stall to touch Rhomberg on the toe. Not knowing the culprit, Rhomberg went around the clubhouse and touched each player.
Brook Jacoby once told of tagging Rhomberg with a ball in the minors, then throwing it out of the stadium. Jacoby said Rhomberg spent two hours looking for the ball before finding it. An umpire once halted play during a game in New York to tell Yankees players to stop touching Rhomberg.
Rohn and Rhomberg were teammates in Venezuela for winter ball, and Rohn touched him one night, then ran off to the clubhouse to hide after his last at-bat.
“He looked for me for two hours,” Rohn said. “I was hiding under desks, in the shower, the bathroom. He couldn’t find me.”
Rohn eventually returned to his hotel, thinking he had outfoxed Rhomberg. But at 3 a.m., there was a knock at his door. A sleepy Rohn stumbled out of bed to open it.
“It was Rhomberg,” Rohn said. “He touched me and ran away.”
Few players carry it to the extreme of Rhomberg, who also, among other quirks, refused to make a right turn, on the premise that runners always turn left while rounding the bases. If circumstances caused him to head right, in life or on the baseball field, he would do so by making a complete circle to the left.
But even removed from Rhomberg’s eccentricities, superstitions and rituals are rife in sports in general, and baseball in particular.
“In the case of baseball, it’s something you acquire when you join the club,” said Stuart Vyse, author of “Believing in Magic: The Psychology of Superstition” and professor of psychology at Connecticut College.
“This is the lore you’re taught, just as elders teach us the things they teach us. It’s hard not to be superstitious in baseball.”
It’s the lengths to which ballplayers will go in their effort to manipulate fate that is most impressive, a monument to the ingenuity of the habitually anxious.
“It’s an attempt to bring certainty into an uncertain world,” said George Gmelch, professor of anthropology at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., and a former minor-leaguer in the Detroit Tigers’ organization.
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“Soldiers do the same thing. Every occupation with a lot of uncertainty.”
And we’re not just talking about the old standards like not stepping on the foul line, which social scientists say is merely an offshoot of the old childhood superstition “Step on a crack, break your mother’s back” or not talking to a pitcher in the midst of a no-hitter.
The latter can be seen as an athletic version of the “evil eye,” which postulates that people can execute a curse with a malevolent gaze.
Hall of Famer Sparky Anderson was among legions who never stepped on the foul line. So is Felipe Alou, but he says it’s merely out of respect to the grounds crew, bringing up a key element to baseball superstitions: denial.
“Most players today would deny being superstitious,” Gmelch said. “It’s kind of pejorative. But if you ask them what they do to give themselves confidence, they’ll tell about their rituals and beliefs, how they like to get to the ballpark at 3:03.
“All that is superstition. If they realized it really is functional, they wouldn’t be so reluctant to admit it.”
The functionality of athletic superstition is subject to considerable debate, even among ballplayers. John Wetteland called them “stupidstitions,” but he never changed his hat and always initialed the ball he used to warm up in the bullpen.
Another skeptic was longtime reliever Doug Jones, who once said, “I don’t want to have my fate tied to an old, raggedy T-shirt or a pair of underwear.”
Jones was referring to the long, proud (and rank) tradition of ballplayers wearing–ad nauseam, emphasis on the nausea–clothes, hats, jewelry or other items they perceive as lucky.
The trend was carried to the ultimate extreme by the Salt Lake Trappers of the independent Pioneer League. Their players didn’t change socks during their professional-record 29-game winning streak in 1987, causing leaguewide celebration, no doubt, when they finally lost.
Superstitions invariably start because a player had success one day that he immediately, if irrationally, attributed to some random occurrence in his life at that moment.
“Most know this is not the case,” said Ron Smith, a psychology professor at the University of Washington and sports psychologist.
“The problem is, we fear negative consequences a lot more than we value positive ones. What happens to an athlete is that if he wore a particular sock or pair of shorts or did some ritual, and had success, he’ll continue to do that.
“That act reduces the anxiety associated with not doing it. It’s the exact same mechanism, clinically, we find in obsessive-compulsive people.”
Just ask John Smoltz, who once was doing jumping jacks in the clubhouse during an Atlanta Braves rally and was afraid to stop lest that he be held responsible for the end of the Braves’ scoring. He ended up doing jumping jacks for nearly half an hour.
Gmelch wrote the influential article “Baseball Magic,” which uses as its basis the studies of Pacific Island fishermen by anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski. He found that the fishermen had rituals to provide magic when they went out in dangerous, shark-infested waters but none when they ventured into safe, calm lagoons.
Gmelch applied this to baseball by postulating that most superstitions involve hitting and pitching, which are the most capricious activities in the game, and few involve fielding, in which players have more control over the outcome.
“The reason the article is reprinted so much, I believe, is that it’s a reminder that we’re no different,” Gmelch said. “Sure, these tribal people have all these beliefs and practices that seem so weird. But look at what we do. It’s the same thing. It speaks to human nature.”