King Kaufman's Sports Daily
Jinx! Another no-hitter destroyed by loose lips. Were you to blame?
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Aug. 31, 2007 | Chien Ming Wang of the New York Yankees was walking off the mound after retiring the Boston Red Sox in the fifth inning of Thursday's game at Yankee Stadium.
"Things are getting interesting," Yes Network announcer Michael Kay said. "Chien Ming Wang has not allowed a hit through five."
Kay took some heat a year ago for the exact same thing, saying on the air that Wang had a perfect game going. According to baseball superstition, talking about a no-hitter jinxes it, and what do you know, Wang didn't get his perfecto.
Kay later went bug nuts on his radio show when a caller criticized him for violating "baseball etiquette" by mentioning the no-hitter. In a bizarre rant, he said, "It used to be 'etiquette' to have black people as slaves," and then, by way of dismissing the unwritten rule of not mentioning a no-hitter: "There's a lot of rules that don't make sense. That's why there was Nazi Germany. Why did they march people into ovens? Well, that's what they told them to do."
Kind of a bad day there for Kay, who managed to keep his job. But while it doesn't, oh, doesn't quite reach equivalency to slavery or the Holocaust, that whole jinxing the no-hitter thing is a pretty silly superstition and there's no reason Kay or any other announcer should pander to it. He seems to make a point of mentioning no-hitters in progress around the fifth inning, which is just about the right time to notice a no-hitter, if you ask me.
I'm not given to superstition, but when I was a kid (uh-oh ... run!) I used to do that thing all sports fans do at some point in their lives: I'd be listening to a game on the radio or watching it in person or on TV, and if things were going well for my team, I'd tell myself I had to keep doing whatever I was doing or the good stuff would stop.
So if I had my legs crossed and the Lakers went on a 12-0 run, I couldn't uncross them till the run ended -- lest the run end. The reverse too. Things were going badly, I'd better switch something up. You know what I'm talking about.
One day I figured out, or imagined, that when I said, "Come on," bad things happened. I'd say, "Come on, score!" as the Rams were lining up for third-and-goal, and they'd get stuffed. I'm sure it happened, like, twice. So I never said, "Come on" to my team anymore.