In many ways, baseball is a game of superstition. That really comes to the forefront when someone is pitching a no-hitter, at which point several big superstitions come into play.
San Diego Padres pitcher Joe Musgrove had to live one of those on Friday night. He admitted he drank a lot of water during his no-hitter against the Texas Rangers, and spent the last few innings of his outing in dire need of a bathroom break that he couldn’t bring himself to take.
“I think I went through 11 or 12 water bottles tonight,” Musgrove told reporters after the game. “I always keep the empty ones next to me so I can kind of keep track of how many I’m drinking throughout the game. And I had to p-ss so bad in like the fourth or fifth inning, but I couldn’t. That was the one thing I didn’t want to break. The superstition of it, didn’t want me to use the bathroom in the middle of a start.”
Whatever the case, it worked, as Musgrove finished off the first no-hitter in Padres history.
Don’t underestimate the power of the jinx. We’ve seen it happen before. Musgrove was taking no chances here, and given how things worked out, he’s probably perfectly fine with what he had to do.
