George Gmelch “Baseball Magic”

George Gmelch “Baseball Magic”

As I was reading “Baseball Magic”, I kept judging the different things people did to improve their “luck”. I thought some were silly, others weird and etc. However, I realized that it does not matter which actions a person takes, whether they are complicated or simple. What matters is the fact that the action is associated with a positive outcome, so repeating it puts the player into a mind set of doing well.

Through much of my life I participated in competitive gymnastics. Just like in baseball gymnasts often have their own rituals. Some things that I liked to do were: my warm up exercises in the same order every time, listen to a specific song before each of my performances, and when practicing my routine if I made a mistake I had to start the routine from the very beginning instead of starting with the move I made a mistake on. I remember a specific time when we arrived late for a competition, so our practice time was cut short. As I was practicing I made a mistake on a simple connecting move and did not get to redo the routine. When I came out to do my routine, I felt weird and agitated as if something was not right. I stumbled through most of my routine, although I never had an issue with it.

Looking back I understand the it was not the fact that I did not get the chance to fix my error in practice that somehow gave me “bad luck”, but rather my concentration on the disturbance of my ritual that took my attention off my actual routine. Rituals allow you to create a pattern and after using it long enough it has a way of composing you and calming you, because it is something familiar in a constantly changing and stressful setting. Unfortunately, they could also hurt you, such as mine did when I was not able to go through with it.

George Gmelch writes that the rituals in baseball are done for not such difference reasons as Trobriand Islanders fishing rituals. Although the rituals, taboos and fetishes are different they serve the same purpose in sports or other activities. They allow the person to feel in control of the circumstances and in turn be more confident. It is a sort of trick we play on ourselves much like the coach played of his team when he hired a driver to drive white horses past the players so they think they saw it by chance. We choose what to believe and we also choose what effect it has on us. So as long as we associate something with a certain action we will continue doing it until we associate something else. This use of rituals, taboos and fetishes in many different cultures shows that we are not all that different.

Bibliography
Gmelch, George. “Baseball Magic”. In Conformity and Conflict: Readings in Cultural Anthropology, 12 ed., ed. Spradley and McCurdy. Allyn & Bacon, 2008, 126-135.