The Japanese Baseball Team Cursed By Colonel Sanders
As a lover of both sports and the occult? Hoo boy, do I enjoy a good sports curse.
For anyone except the afflicted team and their fans, it’s a delightful bit of magical lore to toss around. Plus, the stakes are usually relatively less gory than some archaeologist being torn apart by a swarm of locusts. Everybody would like to be in the World Series, but nobody has to have a closed-casket funeral if you don’t make it.
Another enjoyable feature is that many times, when it comes to sports curses, you don’t have to desecrate a mummy or hit a one-eyed hag with your station wagon to get one put on you. Examples abound of not particularly magical issuers seemingly locking a franchise into extended irrelevance through an angry hex. The curse supposedly placed on the Red Sox by Babe Ruth. The curse Bobby Layne placed on the Detroit Lions. The curse placed on the Chicago Cubs by the angered owner of a local billy goat.
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But maybe the weirdest curse of all, a delightful discovery via Drew Magary's mailbag, is the so-called “Curse of the Colonel.” It comes from the custom-built cauldron for paranormal concerns that is Japanese baseball. In 1985, when the Hanshin Tigers had just won the Central League pennant, what started as a bit of tongue-in-cheek half-celebration, half-ritual ended up ensuring it wouldn’t be repeated anytime soon.
As a tribute to a famous author who once stated, “If the Tigers win the pennant, I’ll jump in the river,” fans followed suit, and pretended to be different players as they flung themselves into the water. One player, though, couldn’t be emulated for his own dive into the Dotonbori River, because it was the American player Randy Bass. With no Americans to become his effigy, the crowd instead turned to the next best thing: the Colonel Sanders statue outside a nearby KFC. Into the dark water the chicken man went, and as the celebrations continued, I imagine the statue’s beady eyes and bolo tie glowed red in the depths.
Apparently, the curse took some time to cook, because the Tigers ended up winning the Japan Series that year. Beginning with their next season, though, the signs that they’d upset a powerful poultry deity started to emerge. After a series of misfortunes, including missing 12 first-round draft pick lotteries in a row, it definitely felt like Col. Sanders might be looking down on them through his half-frames and laughing.
Now, is the idea that a baseball team’s success is directly tied to a submerged fast-food mascot stupid? Of course. So are most sports curses. But until you get another big win, whatever bogeyman you’ve wronged looms large.
That’s how a lot of sports curses continue — as a sort of joking refrain from beleaguered fans that’s still audibly tinged with concern. “Don’t be ridiculous,” someone will say, before a haunting silence interrupts the conversation. People cared enough that a TV show called Knight Scoop tried to dredge up the Colonel's remains from the Dotonbori three years later in 1988, and declared upon failing, “Until the Colonel is rescued and cleansed of its sludge, Hanshin has no hopes of winning a championship.”
In 2023, the Hanshin Tigers did just that, winning the Japan Series for the first time in 38 years. Curse invalidated! Kick rocks, algae-coated Colonel!
Right?
Not quite. In 2009, divers looking for unexploded ordnance dug up instead the top half of Sanders, and with a little more digging, he, sans his hand and glasses, was returned to his proper space. Unfortunately meaning that as scientific as you might be, there will never be a way to conclusively prove that the ghost of Harlan Sanders, furious over a desecrated plastic stand-in, doomed a Japanese baseball team to irrelevance for over a quarter-century.
