Are our superstitions valid?

Baseball postseason is well underway, or should I say well slugger-way. 

With the Dodgers up 3-0 in the NLCS against the Milwaukee Brewers, things are looking pretty good for a potential back-to-back World Series title.

And although I appreciate the Dodger success, my attention is shifting toward a different Los Angeles team: the purple and gold. With their season beginning next week, I've developed a hunch that this will be our year.

LeBron James of the Los Angeles Lakers tosses chalk in the air before a preseason game against the Brooklyn Nets at T-Mobile Arena in 2023.

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The reasons are simple:

• It’s Lebron James’ 23rd season — the same number stamped onto his jersey.
• The last time the Lakers won a Championship, the Dodgers also won the World Series.

Will all this serendipity bring us home? I’m not sure. Hope is not a strategy, and I can’t waste time. That's why this year, I plan to count from 8 to 24 to invoke the spirit of the late great Kobe Bryant before every game and pray for the best.

Irrational, you say? Maybe. But I’m not alone.

Sports fans around the world lean on their favorite self-proclaimed loss-proof rituals. Undoubtedly, though, no other sport has the long and oh so deep love affair with superstitions like baseball does.

But what makes us believe in "good juju?" Sports-related or not, are superstitious tendencies actually helping us?

LAist 89.3’s AirTalk spoke recently with Jess Boddy, science journalist and producer of the podcast The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week and Laura Krantz, journalist, editor, and author of Do You Believe in Magic? to explain why we lean on superstitions in daily life.

The curse of the belief

Lucky mustard-stained jerseys. Rally caps. Clutching onto a Dodger-blue rosary quartz at the bottom of the 9th. How about attributing your career’s success to a chicken-fueled diet — not to mention, of course, the decades-old curses of Billy Goat and Bambino.

Why do we cling to these seemingly meaningless gestures?

“There’s 162 games over a six-month-long regular season. There are on average 142 pitches in a game, which amounts to like 23,000 pitches in a year,” said Boddy. “That’s a pretty big sample size for a lot of unpredictable plays to happen.”

This kind of unpredictability as a fan causes excessive stress, fear and anxiety.

“We are stressed, especially in these playoff times, where there is a human need to try to pitch in by flipping our hat inside out in the stands or stabbing a voodoo doll,” Boddy said. “Thats kind of why baseball is where superstitions come into play the most.”

Our need for control

When it comes down to it, we like being prepared and in control. In the absence of these, our brains try to fill in the blanks.

“Superstitions have to do with a feeling of control,” said Krantz, who spoke with many psychologists about superstitions. “In situations where we don't know what the outcome is going to be, like for instance with the Dodgers, we are going to engage in superstitious behavior.”

AirTalk listeners also weighed in with their takes.

Ivy in Burbank said, “I spent my childhood trying to avoid cracks and picking up lucky pennies, and it never worked. I’ve gone full reverse. I book flights on the 13th and step on cracks. It’s been working out for me.”

Neera from Irvine also chimed in: “If we are looking for a parking spot. We sing a song to ‘Bernice Bernice the parking goddess.’ Amazingly, parking spots just appear. For Southern California, I do have problems with traffic, so I expanded her realm to ‘Bernice Bernice the transportation goddess.’ She keeps me calm sometimes.”

The Verdict

So is it finally time to retire that mustard-stained jersey? Krantz took the pragmatic view that there's much about life, the universe, and frankly everything that we just don't know much about.

“We don’t know, we have to exist in this grey area where we have an idea of what science says, but there’s a lot that science doesn’t know,” Krantz said. “It’s OK to kind of play with the edges of that a little bit.”

So for now, I hope you'll join me in doing 10 push-ups every time a batter is walked — at least until science can prove without a doubt that I should be doing 15 instead.

Listen to the full conversation below: