Score one for the Dirtbags

If you haven’t seen Bryan Holmgren’s video of the Newton Railers baseball team yet, I have no idea what you are waiting for. This package brought on a flood of memories.

Athletes across the board are borderline loopy at best. But nothing compares to the obsessive compulsive disorder that seems to be a part of the same genetic code that makes a baseball player.

Hockey players might have an argument, but it’s a close race.

And in the middle of Harvey County, the Railers have found a way to crossbreed baseball and hockey madness, in the form of facial hair. Playoff beards have been a hockey tradition as old as the sport itself. When the playoffs come around, you let it grow—plain and simple.

It doesn’t matter if you have to shave four times a day to keep from looking like you have lived off the land in the mountains for the past decade, or if you have the scrawniest, patchiest, 13-year-old beard known to man. You let it grow.

Now Newton’s baseball team has taken this scruffy, awesome superstition and made it their own. I hope the team adopts this as an annual tradition.

Dirtbaggers, I salute you!

I happen to be among the ranks of the crazies who believe in these superstitions. There are a billion or more baseball superstitions—stepping over the foul line when you come on and off the field just to give one tame example.

My tick was not washing my game socks for an entire season. Let me tell you, it didn’t get to smell any better throughout the course of the summer. And no one was knocking anybody over to haul my disgusting feet to the road games either.

But the way I see it, I had all the dirt from all the games in the past with me, and I was a catcher so my “essence” was extremely distracting to the opposing hitters.

Naturally, there was a ceremonial burning of the socks when the season was over. All just a completely normal, rational part of being the best ballplayer you can.

I have been in a heated argument over the reality of superstition with a friend of mine that has been going on for years now.

He thinks the whole thing is completely absurd. I beg to differ.

It’s not that I believe in superstitions on a supernatural level. I would not be swallowed into the bowels of a monster without my superstitions. But it is a form of OCD. You need your rituals to get yourself right in the head.

If I had washed my socks, I wouldn’t have been able to stop thinking about it. It would have been the itch on your back you can’t quite reach. In a game of failure, it wouldn’t have taken much to send my thoughts into a tailspin of negativity.

Swing and miss for strike one with dirty socks—no big deal. Swing and miss for strike one with freshly washed socks—oh no, what have I done!?