Our National Pastime — Baseball and Witches? Guest Post by Lynda Allen

Given the holiday we’re celebrating tomorrow, let’s talk about our National Pastime. I’ve been a baseball fan all my life. I grew up in South Jersey as a Phillies fan, but my loyalties shifted years ago to the Washington Nationals (long story). I knew I wanted to incorporate my love of baseball into one of the books in my Liv Wilde Mysteries series. But baseball and menopause? Not exactly a natural fit. 

Or, so it seemed at first. Yet, when I thought about how superstitious baseball players are, I realized it was a perfect complement to a storyline that featured a witch hunt in book three, Flashes of Fire and Fury. 

Superstitions are found in all aspects of baseball, from the players on the field to the fans to the announcers. Heaven forbid a TV or radio announcer mentions a no-hitter or perfect game in progress. Their words will immediately cause a shift in the momentum of the game. If their team is behind late in the game, fans will turn their baseball caps inside out, making them “rally caps”, in hopes it will help the team make a comeback. Players have been known to wear the same socks for many games in a row or eat the same food before a game every day in order to keep a streak going. You’ll see players go through the same motions when they step into the batter’s box, whether making the sign of the cross or making a mark in the dirt with their bat. And don’t dare say the word sl*mp when a batter isn’t hitting well, or you will only prolong the unmentionable situation. It’s worse than saying Macbeth inside a theatre.  

So, it seemed only logical (at least in my mind) to have a player from the local Washington Nationals minor league team, the Fred Nats, show up on Liv’s doorstep begging for her help to break a curse that’s keeping him from hitting. He’s tried everything to end his sl*mp and Liv is his last hope. She’s been asked to help people find a lot of things, but never someone’s lost mojo. Being a fan of the team and the game, she agrees to try to discover the source of the curse, even though she’s not sure she believes in curses. She knows that if he believes it’s true, then it will keep impacting his abilities on the field.

One of the joys of writing about our local team is that it gave me a reason to reach out to the general manager of the team, Robert J. Perry, and tell him about the book and ask for a tour of the stadium. He took my husband and me on a two-hour tour. We have been to many games there before, but it was such fun to see behind the scenes and in the locker rooms. We even got to see the “baseball mud” which was a whole new aspect of baseball for me. Apparently each ball has to be rubbed with a very specific mud – from New Jersey of course – before it can be used in a game. It’s the same mud across the minors and the majors. These are the tidbits I learn when I dig into the research for a book, that whether or not they make it into the book, make the story richer and more authentic. And all I had to do was ask. Now I’m looking forward to having a table at an upcoming game right after the launch of Flashes of Fire and Fury.

As the title of the book indicates, there is a darker element to the story. There is also a darker connection between baseball and the book. You can’t write about witch hunts without touching on the persecution of and violence inflicted upon women during the intense witch hunts in North America and Europe when an estimated 60,000 people, mostly women, were executed. While obviously not as dire as the witch hunts, athletics in the United States have long been an obvious area of inequity between men and women - and it was pretty damn dire for the young women and girls who were sexually abused in the U.S. gymnastics system. But you also need look no further than the recent debates about pay scales for the winning U.S. women’s soccer team vs. the not-so-winning (hopefully that will be different by the time you read this) men’s team to see the imbalance. In terms of baseball, a few women are finally playing at the collegiate level, but it wasn’t until 2025 that a woman umpire worked a game in the major leagues in the MLB. What reasoning could be offered for why a woman can’t be just as good an umpire as a man is beyond me. And there are more women announcers, women coaches, and women in the front office in management positions. Slow progress is being made.

Why is this all important to the Liv Wilde Mysteries? Because women and the relationships between them are the heart of the stories. In Flashes of Fire and Fury, the struggles women face to be accepted for who they are and the danger of blanket judgements made against them for who they are, are integral elements of the story. Liv would not be the woman she is and would not have been able to embrace her superpower without the support of her circle of friends and the solidarity of strong women she meets along the way. Looking around at the strong women who make up this blog, I’d say you all know just how important the women in our lives are.

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Lynda Allen is the author of the Liv Wilde Mysteries in which menopause is a superpower! Since she had to put up with hot flashes every day, she figured she might as well make them useful. Lynda proudly infuses her writing with her Jersey Girl sensibilities and aims to create stories imbued with heart and humor. She lives in Fredericksburg, VA, where her mysteries are set, with her husband, their cat, and the incredible eagle friends who visit often. When she’s not writing about hot flash-induced psychic visions, she also writes poetry and is an artist. 

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