As we might have mentioned before, we are a tad superstitious when it comes to sports. Much of it is related to fan-dom, but it can also be traced back to our baseball playing days and a certain pair of “lucky” underwear. When our team won the North Dakota championship as 12 year olds, earning the right to travel to beautiful Parsons, Kan., for the regional tournament, you can best believe who had his lucky underwear on while pitching the critical Game 3 of the three-game final series. (You can also best believe we were wearing them in Kansas when we gave up what is still believed to be the longest home run in organized baseball history. Seriously, NASA has not yet confirmed whether 19 years later that sucker has landed yet. But we digress). The point: If you think something is lucky, it is (at least until it isn’t). Because as Yogi Berra once said, “Baseball is 90 percent mental; the other half is physical.” Crash Davis expanded on this malapropism in Bull Durham when he chided a young Nuke LaLoosh for a youthful indiscretion by saying, “Don’t [redacted] with a winning streak.” The point of all this? Last year on Mother’s Day, the Twins used some Pink Bat power to hit four home runs (a season-high to that point which perhaps stood up for the entire season) in a 16-4 rout of the Tigers. This year, last night, they hit a season-high three (they hadn’t even hit two in a game yet this year, which is sad not in the way Skid Row’s “18 and Life” is sad, but rather a different kind of sad). Now, the homers last night came from players who were not on last year’s team, so we’re not going to suggest there was some grand carryover. But it wouldn’t surprise us if at least a couple of last year’s players remembered the previous rout and used it as fuel for yesterday. If they didn’t, we know two guys who will be thinking pink next year: Adam Everett and Craig Monroe, who combined for the three home runs while using the pink bats. From MLB.com:

“What a day for that,” (Monroe) said. “My mom is my biggest supporter. She has to be jumping up and down at home. I’m going to see if I can use that thing tomorrow. I swung well.”

Everett, who hit his first home run of the season with the pink bat, also wondered if he could bring it out again Monday.

“I don’t know if they are going to let us keep using those, but, hopefully, they will,” he said.

The bats, we’re guessing, are standard issue except for the pink finish. They should have no bearing on performance. But if a player thinks they do, then they do. And that’s one of the things that makes sports — and life, really — so fascinating. We don’t know what is going through every player’s head. We don’t know all the rituals that are playing themselves out, either helping a base hit or making the difference sometimes between a routine play and a ground ball through someone’s legs. It’s the reason — not to excuse it — that bizarre and crude rituals like the White Sox blow-up doll scandal of recent vintage can on a basic level be understood. Craig Monroe knows that, say, studying today’s starting pitcher will probably help him in a more logical way than a pink bat, just as Sox players knew patient at-bats were more important than an inflatable shrine. But it’s all about getting from A to B. Many players will try anything — lucky underwear included — to gain an edge. Even if logic tells us it doesn’t matter.

Fasola-link! Livening up cricket.

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