hout:

"Uncross the bats! Uncross the bats!"

It's as bad as discovering a three-alarm fire in an excelsior factory.
Don't believe it? Then listen to what happened to the Giants once because
a careless bat boy neglected his duty. The team was playing in Cincinnati
in the season of 1906 when one of the bats got crossed through the
carelessness of the boy. What was the result? "Mike" Donlin, the star
slugger of the team, slid into third base and came up with a broken
ankle.

Ever since that time we have carried our own boy with us, because a club
with championship aspirations cannot afford to take a chance with those
foreign artists handling the bats. They are likely to throw you down at
any time.

The Athletics have a funny superstition which is private or confined to
their team as far as I know. When luck seems to be breaking against them
in a game, they will take the bats and throw them wildly into the air and
let them lie around in front of their bench, topsy-turvy. They call this
changing the luck, but any other club would consider that it was the worst
kind of a jinx. It is the same theory that card-players have about
shuffling the deck vigorously to bring a different run of fortune. Then,
if the luck changes, the Athletics throw the bats around some more to keep
it. This act nearly cost them one of their best ball-players in the third
game of the 1911 world's series.

The Philadelphia players had tossed their bats to break their run of luck,
for the score was 1 to 0 against them, when Baker came up in the ninth
inning. He cracked his now famous home run into the right-field bleachers,
and the men on the bench hurled the bats wildly into the air. In jumping
up and reaching for a bat to throw, Jack Barry, the shortstop, hit his
head on the concrete roof of the structure and was stunned for a minute.
He said that little black specks were floating in front of his eyes, but
he gamely insisted on playing the contest out. "Connie" Mack was so
worried over his condition that he sent Ira Thomas out on the field to
inquire if he were all right, and this interrupted the game in the ninth
inning. A lot of the spectators thought that Thomas was out there, bearing
some secret message from "Connie" Mack. None knew that he was ascertaining
the health of a player who had almost killed himself while killing a jinx.

The Athletics, for two seasons, have carried with them on all their trips
a combination bat boy and mascot who i