With the infield weakened by the loss of Devlin, the club began to lose with great regularity. But one day the jinxess was missing and she never came back. She must have read in the newspapers what she was doing to Devlin, her hero, and quit the national pastime or moved to another part of the stand. With this weight off his shoulders, Arthur went back into the game and played like mad. "If she'd stuck much longer," declared McGraw, joyous in his rejuvenated third baseman, "I would have had her eyes operated on and straightened. This club couldn't afford to keep on losing ball games because you are such a Romeo, Arthur, that even the cross-eyed ones fall for you." Ball-players are very superstitious about the bats. Did you ever notice how the clubs are all laid out in a neat, even row before the bench and are scrupulously kept that way by the bat boy? If one of the sticks by any chance gets crossed, all the players will shout: "Uncross the bats! Uncross the bats!" It's as bad as discovering a three-alarm fire in an excelsior factory. Don't believe it? Then listen to what happened to the Giants once because a careless bat boy neglected his duty. The team was playing in Cincinnati in the season of 1906 when one of the bats got crossed through the carelessness of the boy. What was the result? "Mike" Donlin, the star slugger of the team, slid into third base and came up with a broken ankle. Ever since that time we have carried our own boy with us, because a club with championship aspirations cannot afford to take a chance with those foreign artists handling the bats. They are likely to throw you down at any time. The Athletics have a funny superstition which is private or confined to their team as far as I know. When luck seems to be breaking against them in a game, they will take the bats and throw them wildly into the air and let them lie around in front of their bench, topsy-turvy. They call this changing the luck, but any other club would consider that it was the worst kind of a jinx. It is the same theory that card-players have about shuffling the deck vigorously to bring a different run of fortune. Then, if the luck changes, the Athletics throw the bats around some more to keep it. This act nearly cost them one of their best ball-players in the third game of the 1911 world's series.