Major league fans are among The.Most.Superstitious.People.In.The.Universe. And  that can sometimes border on the obsessive compulsive. A friend and fellow blogger will eat the same meal before every Big Game if that meal was ingested before a Big Win. If the Yankees go on to lose, she changes the menu. My talisman happens to be What I Wear. And unlike a meal that can be boring and bland but tolerable if it brings about the Desired Result, wearing the same clothes over a three day home stand can knock other people's socks off. And not just red socks.

Washing the clothes can just scrub the magic out of them. So I wait until the Monday 'off day' to do the laundry and don't act at all surprised if people step back or if those not In The Know (non baseball fans) think I'm doing the Walk Of Shame. The first "lucky clothes" I remember are a pair of pajamas I wore during the 1998 playoffs. I was visiting my mom who was a Yankee fan and who also scoffed at the very idea of "lucky clothes". Down in the series vs. Cleveland at the time, trailing in the game, my mom said to me, "Where are those pajamas?"

I pointed to the clean clothes in the  laundry basket. "There."

"Put them on," she said.

You know the rest. I should probably send those pajamas with the shot-to-hell elastic to Cooperstown.

Last year it was all about the T-shirt I bought on the street after the ticker tape parade that year and jeans and lucky blue anklets and lucky argyle sneakers and lucky earrings with interlocked NY and necklace with Yankees insignia and if I forgot even one of them and the Yankees lost, I knew it was All My Fault and I had to try harder. Like the team did.

Meals are a lot easier to duplicate.