Baseball and sacrificing chickens - isn't that how seasons are won???

(Thanks to my sister dear for pointing me in the direction of this story!)

Well, baseball season started yesterday, and the New York Yankees won their Opening Day game. YAY!!!

Of course, they're not playing today. They have to ease into their season, you know. You can't just go playing baseball every day, right off the bat (pun intended). :-)

Baseball players are known to be a very superstitious bunch. Their good luck trinkets... at bat rituals... shaving or not shaving if on a streak or in a slump... probably what undies they wear at home games vs away games... the game is rife with superstitions that must be observed, if there is any hope of winning the World Series.

Speaking of undies, I was always hoping that Mike Mussina (#35, pitcher, NYY, now retired)...

...would develop a superstition or two of his own, along the lines of having to model underwear like Jim Palmer once did...

...but that did not pan out, sadly.

But, as I said, it is common knowledge in the baseball world that superstitions are taken very seriously, and not to be underestimated.

Which is what makes this following "news" story so freakishly insane.

Two teenage boys in Texas decided to go on their school baseball field during spring break in mid-March, and sacrifice two chickens to the baseball gods, to help improve their year.

The backlash from this event is unbelieveable.

The boys are not allowed to play baseball for the rest of the year. Not only that, but they are being threatened with felony charges, 2 year jail sentences, and fines of up to $10,000. FELONY charges. That could potentially mean they'll lose the right to vote (when they're old enough to earn that right) and never be able to own a gun. For God's sake...

PETA, predictably, is crying fowl... er... foul. They run around like a chicken with its head cut off when something like this happens, so they can feather their own nest with the free publicity.

How often have I, myself, used the expression "I'm going to go sacrifice a chicken...", particularly during my offshore life, when wanting good weather in order to get home. Granted, I didn't actually DO it, but it wasn't from some sense of moral outrage against harming poultry. It's because it's actually a bit challenging to find a live chicken on an oil platform. I usually really wanted to get home.

The boys decapitated the two chickens. Oooooooo!!!!!! How ironic it is that, if they had had a big pot of hot oil on hand to drop the battered birds into, they'd be charged with nothing more than having a cook-out. Maybe with stealing Colonel Sanders' recipe of 11 secret herbs and spices.

Seriously. What do people, especially PETA people, think is in that bucket? But that's not the salient point. The salient point is... what happened to the sacred chicken BETWEEN the time when it was clucking around the barnyard, to ending up in said bucket? Dunno 'bout you, but I have visions of big burly men with cleavers, for starters.

Well, I guess it's safe to assume that this town in Texas must be a poultry-free zone, full of free-range nuts.

Finally, I hope the team that these two boys played for goes on to ace the rest of their season. The school and the town will be squawking from the other side of their beaks then, won't they? There won't be a chicken safe in the state of Texas this time next year.

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