No Talking About No-Hitting

When I walked into the living room, I heard the all-too-familiar sound—the clicking and flipping between sporting events, in this case, the Cal vs. Tennessee football game and the Red Sox. “How are the Sox doing?” I asked my clicker-clutching husband. He hesitated for a moment, mulling over his response. “Let’s just say there’s something very interesting going on.”

I looked up to see a skinny kid on the mound in the middle of a wind-up. The crowd cheered after the strike was called, our own Ex-Red Sox Kevin Millar caught looking. One batter later the commentators reviewed the status of the game, carefully choosing their words as the camera scanned the scoreboard of zeros across seven innings, pausing on the zero under the letter “H.” With the inning over, the scrawny-looking kid made his way back to the bench. The cameras followed the lonely soul, closing in on his focused, tense face before scanning the empty bench around him. Not a teammate in sight, not a word spoken.

It’s funny, this jinx thing. Grown men and women buy into it, this belief in the omnipotence of our actions and words. We believe that by saying “he has a no-hitter going,” we will somehow negatively alter the outcome of the game. So instead we say something like “no player has reached base as the result of the bat connecting with the ball” or “let’s just say there’s something interesting going on.” We believe if we knock on a wooden coffee table, sit in the same spot on the couch, and cross our fingers and toes, the outcome will be as we want it to be.

Though I’ve not watched many games this season, I’ve followed the Red Sox through scanning the sports pages and box scores. I knew it wasn’t going to last when we were 10 games up on the Yankees in early August, and I prepared myself for the usual late summer collapse. When the lead shrunk to 4 and then bounced back to 8, I thought maybe something different was going to happen this year, that the Sox might—dare I say it?—finally win the division. But then the Yankees sweep in the Bronx reduced the lead to 5 and I got all negative again. A win at this juncture was, in my admittedly unprofessional opinion, crucial. This particular game, the game where words were carefully chosen, was a done-deal with the Sox up by 10 runs. Still, I was riveted. I matched the funny name (Clay Buchholz) to the new kid’s face and anxiously waited to see how it turned out.

It was at this point the unthinkable happened. “What are you doing?” I yelled when my husband inexplicably clicked back to the college football game after Buchholz took to the mound in the bottom of the eighth. My husband then relayed, in no uncertain terms, the critical nature of his action. “Trust me. It’s better if we don’t watch,” he said, before going on to explain how watching the game, like calling out the unspeakable, would be a jinx. Undeterred, I put my foot down. “That’s ridiculous. We’re not turning off the game,” I said. After a heated and somewhat testy discussion, we finally agreed that there would be no more clicking.

And so we watched history unfurl as the first-ever Red Sox rookie threw a no-hitter. Though we may sometimes think otherwise, we learned that fans can’t actually control the outcome of the game simply by watching it. We were, though, careful with our words, never once uttering “no hitter” until the final pitch when the last Oriole was caught looking. And then—and only then—did I uncross my fingers.

This column was originally published on townonline.com September, 2007