Devil … be gone!
For 10 years, they were a lousy team with a fiendish nickname: the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. Then the club exorcised the “Devil” from its name, and suddenly Tampa Bay is in the World Series.
Was it the hitting, the pitching, the coaching – or the hand of God?
“I told my wife before the season started, ‘Whoever is in that organization made, to me, a very interesting decision,”’ said Les Steckel, a former NFL coach and head of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, an evangelical ministry. “Six months later, look what happens.”
ven though theologians universally will tell you that God takes no rooting interest in sports, fans often manage to find signs of damnation and redemption everywhere – particularly in baseball.
Until their 2004 World Series win, the Red Sox were operating under the so-called Curse of the Bambino, denied a Word Series win for trading Babe Ruth to New York in 1918.
The Billy Goat curse still haunts the Chicago Cubs. In 1945, the Greek immigrant owner of the Billy Goat Tavern damned the team when he was kept out of a World Series game because he wanted to bring a goat to Wrigley Field. Chicago, of course, hasn’t been back to the series since.
How seriously does Chicago take it? Earlier this month, the Cubs had a Greek Orthodox priest bless the home dugout and spread holy water before their first-round playoff series with the Dodgers. Chicago got swept.
Still, when the suffering does end for some teams, fans insist it’s divine intervention lifting players beyond their limits.
Think Boston’s Curt Schilling in 2004 and his bloody sock, a miracle on the mound.
Fast-forward to Tampa’s Game 7 American League Championship Series win Sunday night over the Red Sox to advance to the World Series against the Philadelphia Phillies.
The Rays won the pennant less than a year after they put the Devil behind them – although many fans in Tampa Bay still call the team by its old name.
ason, the Rays hadn’t even had a winning season.
“You take the ‘Devil’ out of the Devil Rays,” said Boston shortstop Alex Cora, pointing to the sky, “and Jesus helps them out.”
Casual use of “devil” in team names and elsewhere troubles Christians who literally interpret Old Testament passages against witchcraft and the occult, said Larry Eskridge of the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals at Wheaton College in Illinois.
Yet there is little outcry for change.
In college sports, Duke’s teams have been called the Blue Devils since the 1920s – a monicker that seems to have originated with a heroic French regiment in World War I, according to school archives. The name caused remarkably little stir at the school, despite its Methodist roots, and hasn’t stopped Duke from winning ACC and national titles.
Eskridge says he occasionally hears a story of protests by parents of young athletes. Steckel says ministries like his still support players and coaches no matter what their team’s nickname.
The thornier religious question behind Tampa’s nickname is this: Does God care about the name or the fate of a team?
The NHL’s New Jersey Devils haven’t been cursed, winning the Stanley Cup three times – although the Buffalo Sabres lost the 1999 finals with star Miroslav Satan (pronounced shuh-TAN) on their roster.
ls – lost to the Red Sox in the American League first-round series.
Christopher Evans, a professor of church history at Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School in Rochester, N.Y., said most sports fans mistake superstition for religion.
A Red Sox fan, Evans said that in the 2004 World Series he feared that if he watched the game on TV, he’d jinx them. And he said he knows other Boston fans who believed that they had to watch every minute for the team to win.
“The rational part of our brain sort of recognizes that a lot of the curse stuff is silly,” said Evans, co-author of “The Faith of 50 Million: Baseball, Religion and American Culture.”
“The reason that Tampa Bay has done well is that they have a great team. They have a great manager.”
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