Baseball Superstitions

From here.

Finally the best one comes from a little known player named Kevin Rhomberg who appeared in a grand total of 41 games for the Cleveland Indians, from 1982-84. His superstition can basically be called a compulsion. There’s no other way to describe it.

His superstition was the need to touch back someone who had just touched him. Like tag during recess in grade school. However doing it when you’re an adult makes you strange. The need to touch someone back was so necessary that if a person somehow eluded his return touch, Rhomberg would send a letter that said, “This constitutes a touch.”

Of course this gets ball players thinking about how they can have some fun at his expense.

Rick Sutcliffe once reached under a bathroom stall to touch Rhomberg on the toe. Not knowing who did it, Rhomberg went around the clubhouse and touched each player. Brook Jacoby once told of tagging Rhomberg with a ball in the minors, then throwing it out of the stadium. Jacoby said that Rhomberg spent two hours looking for the ball before finding it. An umpire once halted play during a game in New York to tell Yankees players to stop touching Rhomberg.

That is seriously so mean but so damn funny. It’s probably a good thing his baseball career only lasted 41 games. Poor guy had enough torture in those games already.