Dan Gordon and Mickey Bradley would love it if instead of candy, you handed out copies of their new book Haunted Baseball: Ghosts, Curses, Legends, and Eerie Events.
Gordon said in an e-mail interview that timing is everything.
The publishers — The Lyons Press — released the book a few weeks ago, to take advantage of the holiday buzz. “But they also thought it would coincide well with the post-season drama that so often becomes attributed to the supernatural. At no other time is there more talk about curses and at no other time are the stranger plays of the game more magnified.”
Here’s the rest of our conversation:
RK: The first thing I thought of after having read a few chapters was “Come on now. Do people really believe this stuff?”
DG: Mickey (right, with Gordon at the Tokyo Dome) and I were surprised by how often players talk about the supernatural in 
baseball. We all know that ballplayers are superstitious. They wear the same clothing when they’re performing well, don’t step on the foul lines, and never talk about a no-hitter while one happens out of fear the baseball gods will strike.
The game in general honors its past and is more nostalgic and reminiscent than any other sport. So we suspected going into the project that we would find some of those stories.
But until we started approaching the players — more than 800 altogether — we weren’t aware just how extensive the ghostlore was. They talk about ghosts all the time in the clubhouse and on team buses traveling into different ballparks and visiting team hotels.
Many ballplayers told us, for instance, that they always talk about the ghosts on the team bus heading into Yankee Stadium. And New York Yankees themselves often talk about the ghosts of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig when walking the corridors of Yankee Stadium or sitting on the bench.
Current Colorado Rockies bench coach Mike Gallego claims that when he played for the
Yanks in the early ‘90s, he heard ghosts taking cuts in the batting cages when no one is there. Former manager Buck Showalter says that when he slept at the ballpark, when there was a day game following a night game, he would hear rustling noises in the ballpark and just assumed it was the Babe “just getting in” after a night on the town. Certain players like Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez, Mariano Rivera, and Rickey Henderson swore that the ghosts would show up at key moments of the game and help a ball drop in or sneak one over the fence. Some said that the wind would pick up just before those moments and they could feel an electricity in the air. Rodriguez says these spectral “tenth players” give the home team “one of the greatest home field advantages in all of sports.”
RK: Was it difficult to get people to talk about these things?
DG: For the most part, players were very comfortable talking about the topic. If they had a story, they would often share it in detail. If they didn’t, they would point us to a teammate in the clubhouse who did have one. I think most players found the topic refreshing, because it’s not the usual line of questioning that they hear on a daily basis. It’s a natural topic that they enjoy talking about amongst one another and with clubhouse attendants. Ballplayers even tease one another.
Veterans will try to scare younger players. For instance, longtime former outfielder Ellis Burks teased up-and-coming C. C. Sabathia and Coco Crisp, when all three were teammates with the Indians, that the Westin St. Francis, the visiting team hotel of the Oakland A’s, was haunted and that several guests had died in the elevators. Crisp and Sabathia were so spooked that they both thought they encountered ghosts in those elevators. But Burks himself also took those stories seriously, and told us that he himself encountered a ghost in his room the next morning. He says he could have sworn he saw a woman in a blue dress in an adjacent room of his suite while he was reading his morning newspaper. The experience frightened him to the point where he called the traveling secretary to change rooms. We spoke with dozens of other ballplayers who changed rooms in the middle of the night. And they seemed to enjoy telling about it, almost as if they were getting something off of their chests.
The one exception were players who were so spooked by the topic that they didn’t want to even discuss it. David Ortiz, for instance, backed off, waving his hands in front of his face when asked about the ghost stories Red Sox players had at the Renaissance Vinoy Hotel in St. Petersburg, a hotel with lots of ballplayer ghostlore. Longtime Pirates reliever Salomon Torres told us that according to his faith as a Jehovah’s Witness, ghosts were demons. So that whenever his teammates chatted about ghosts, he preferred stepping out of the conversation.
RK: Did you and Mickey experience any of these things for yourself?
DG: No, but that wasn’t our goal. In general though, we weren’t looking to find out if ghosts are a real phenomenon or not. Early on in the project we decided that we wanted to just chronicle these stories that are out there and that players believe. We viewed ourselves more as baseball folklorists than someone trying to prove or disprove the idea of ghosts. These stories have a lot to offer beyond just an entertaining read. They’re a good way to explore the rich history of the game and nostalgia that sets the game apart from all other sports. We also were able to chronicle more about the behind-the-scenes daily life of players.
Ballplayers and stadium workers would often take us to different parts of the ballpark that few fans get to see. In Dodger Stadium, merchandise workers showed us the vaults deep underneath the stadium where the team stores old Brooklyn Dodgers memorabilia and Walter O’Malley’s hunting trophies. Workers told us that those areas were haunted, and although I didn’t sense ghosts, those places were often dark and a bit eerie. Similarly, walking through the old passageways and tunnels of Yankee Stadium, Fenway and Wrigley, once can’t help but reflect on the history there and all the players that have passed through those parks. It’s not hard to imagine the current ballplayers and stadium workers conjuring up ghosts.
RK: No pun intended, but there’s a lot of spirituality in baseball, a lot of tradition that leads to sentiments that are frequently expressed in the book. Like the baseball gods and the ghosts of those who have played before. But isn’t that metaphorical?
DG: We found that many of the expressions that have been referred to metaphorically by fans and media, such as “ghosts of Yankee Stadium” and “baseball gods,” are interpreted more literally by ballplayers. We asked dozens of ballplayers about the “baseball gods” and the vast majority of American-born ballplayers (and far fewer Latin American and Asian players) thought these were real entities that presided over the game and meted justice on ballplayers who disrespected the game or didn’t keep an even keel. Tom Glavine described them to us as “the old theoretical powers that be that govern or watch 
over baseball.” Asked who these gods might be, he said “designees of a higher god.” Diamondbacks third baseman Conor Jackson says the gods even make sure that ballplayers respect the past. “Don’t talk about how Babe Ruth didn’t face as good a pitching as we face today,” he says. “Because the baseball gods will bite you, man.”
Interestingly, though, the term did not always exist in the game. The earliest references to the term that we could find dated back to the 1920s, when newspaper reporters started using it to refer to luck and fate in the game. When we asked old-timers about the term, few said they’d thought about it much in their playing days. Willie Mays told us he had never even heard of the term.
RK: Many baseball books come out in the spring. Did your publisher time the release of the book for this season to take advantage of the Halloween factor?
DG: They did, but they also thought it would coincide well with the postseason drama that so often becomes attributed to the supernatural. At no other time is there more talk about curses and at no other time are the stranger plays of the game more magnified.” Mickey and I would also like to believe that this is an enjoyable hot stove read. The book is loaded with baseball history and lore, as well as stories about current ballplayers. We’ve found at book signings that lots of people are buying the books as gifts.
RK: What role does religion have in a player’s acceptance of the paranormal?
DG: Religion does sometimes play into it in a number of ways. Occasionally, a religious Christian player would mention that they preferred not paying attention to the ghosts. As I’d mentioned, Torres said he thought they were perhaps demons in disguise as ghosts.
When asked about hauntings at Edison Field, Tim Salmon told me he’d heard about it, but thought it was better to focus on God, and not the occult.
Seattle Mariners starter Miguel Batista brought in another perspective. He shared a story about how he and Armando Benitez were followed by a shape-shifting demon when returning from an outing hunting crabs in San Pedro de Macoris, Dominican Republic. He described how a cow was following them and how it turned into a dog. He says he and Benitez hot-footed it to civilization. I asked him to explain what he’d meant, and he mentioned that many of the locals in San Pedro believe in vodun, which was brought over from sugar cane workers brought in from Haiti.
RK: Along those lines, what about nationality? Does one group — such as Latino players
— strike you as more superstitious than others, or would that be inviting stereotypes?
DG: Superstition seems prevalent among players of all cultural backgrounds. I even interviewed a number of Japanese ballplayers who were very superstitious. They spoke about carrying talismans and of the tradition of pouring salt in the dugouts to ward off evil spirits.
But some Latin American players seemed to be more spiritual about it and tried to ward off evil. Some Venezeualan players carry talismen in their back pockets. Those are given to them from witchcraft practitioners at botanicos, shops that exist in many Latin American communities in the U.S. to ward off spirits. Others just seemed a little more uneasy staying in haunted hotels.
A story that didn’t make it into this book, but will apear in the sequel, comes from a longtime second baseman Luis Figueroa, who says that when an earthquake hit one night when they were on the road, he and his roommate Dickie Gonzalez grabbed machetes and hid under the sheets hoping the ghosts wouldn’t get them. But then again any non-Hispanics are just as terrified staying in certain hotels and just display it in different ways, such as sleeping with the lights on or requesting a room change. I’m not sure if this invites stereotypes, and the sample was a bit small, but I did interview a number of Hispanic players in Spanish.
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Gordon was interviewed recently on WTAE-TV in Pittsburgh:
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is available on Amazon.com,
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