Lifting the Curse

It was there everyday for 3310 days, staring the the Redbirds players in the face during their indoor batting sessions, taunting them. Unassuming to passersby, but a longtime hurdle or curse for a struggling franchise.

The blank yellow pennant.

Legend has it that back in 2000, when the Redbirds won their first PCL Championship, chief engineer Goose 'Cranberry' Larson added to the batting cage mural by painting a 2000 pennant to the collection of championship pennants, as well as a blank pennant underneath it.

His thinking for the extra pennant was that the team, with such stars as Albert Pujols and Stubby Clapp, would be winning again in the near future. What Goose didn't know though was that Pujols would leave the Triple-A club to become the Cardinals MVP of the aughts, and the absence of another championship would leave the pennant empty for some time.

The players never talked about it and if you didn't know any better, one might have thought they didn't even know about it. But I assure you, it's lurking in the backs of their minds.

Deep in the middle of their first postseason trip since 2000, I recently went down to the clubhouse to see if I could have the players weigh-in on the curse. But before I could even utter the question out, the Redbirds Athletic Trainer Chris Conroy pulled me aside.

"The players don't like talking about it," Conroy told me. "In fact, it is never talked about in the clubhouse, we've kicked guys out for talking about it."

Luckily, I wasn't kicked out and Conroy was more than willing to give me a little background on the curse.

According to our inside man, the players really didn't start paying it any attention until 2005 when 'Iron Mike', the team's pitching machine that sits alongside the mural's wall, started acting funny.

"It was pretty strange, the pitches from the machine would start pulling towards that wall," Conroy said pointing at the mural. "It didn't matter how fast or slow you set 'Mike' to, the ball would always veer to [the wall]."

The machine's problems could have been attributed to its old age, but the players seemed to latch on to the idea that 'Mike' was pointing to the blank pennant. In 2006, six years since their championship, the curse of the blank pennant was a full-fledged actuality and Goose Larson was out of a job.

Conroy was so open about the blank pennant simply because he does not believe in sports curses. I also asked Australian strength trainer Cameron Brown, who played dumb, probably for superstitious reasons.

But as of Friday, September 18, the Redbirds no longer have to worry about the curse of the blank pennant, having won the PCL crown in Sacramento. Now when the team returns to Memphis, a '2009' will fill the historic void, officially lifting the curse from the team. And I guarantee that underneath it the wall will remain white.