In THE MAGICAL GAME, journalist and converted baseball fan Addy Baird turns her reporter’s eye to her favorite sport, investigating the roots of these magical practices and telling the story of baseball’s long history of superstition, rituals, curses, jinxes, hoodoos and hexes. Spanning three centuries of baseball history and three dozen more of magical history, Baird takes readers through fascinating, forgotten tidbits in the sport, untangles the game’s legends, and considers baseball’s uncertain future. In the face of recent MLB rule changes and the rise of advanced statistics, Baird looks at the many decades of concern about baseball’s declining popularity and the evolution of the sport, as well as why and how a culture of magic has remained strong at the core of the game for so many years.