The first stop was in Boston, and on the day we arrived it rained. In the mail that day, addressed to Leon Ames, came a necktie and a four-leaf clover from a prominent actress, wishing Ames good luck. The directions were inside the envelope. The four-leaf clover, if the charm were to work, must be worn on both the uniform and street clothes, and the necktie was to be worn with the street clothes and concealed in the uniform, if that necktie could be concealed anywhere. It would have done for a headlight and made Joseph’s coat of many colors look like a mourning garment.
“Might as well wish good luck to a guy on the way to the morgue,” murmured Ames as he surveyed the layout, but he manfully put on the necktie, taking his first dose of the prescription, as directed, at once, and he tucked the four-leaf clover away carefully in his wallet.
“You’ve got your work cut out for you, old boy,” he remarked to the charm as he put it away, “but I’d wear you if you were a horseshoe.”
The first day that Ames pitched in Boston he won, and won in a stroll.
“The necktie,” he explained that night at dinner, and pointed to the three-sheet, colored-supplement affair he was wearing around his collar, “I don’t change her until I lose.”
And he didn’t lose a game on that trip. Once he almost did, when he was taken out in the sixth inning, and a batter put in for him, but the Giants finally pulled out the victory and he got the credit for it. He swept through the West unbeatable, letting down Pittsburg with two or three hits, cleaning up in St. Louis, and finally breaking our losing streak in Chicago after two games had gone against us. And all the time he wore that spectrum around his collar for a necktie. As it frayed with the wear and tear, more colors began to show, although I didn’t think it possible. If he had had occasion to put on his evening clothes, I believe that tie would have gone with it.
For my part, I would almost rather have lost a game and changed the necktie, since it gave one the feeling all the time that he was carrying it around with him because he had had the wrong end of an election bet, or something of the sort. But not Ames! He was a game guy. He stuck with the necktie, and it stuck with him, and the combination kept right on winning ball games. Maybe he didn’t mind it because he could not see it himself, unless he looked in a mirror, but it was rough on the rest of the team, except that we needed the games the necktie won, to take the pennant.
Columns were printed in the newspapers about that necktie, and it became the most famous scarf in the world. Ames used to sleep with it under his pillow alongside of his bank roll, and he didn’t lose another game until the very end of the season, when he dropped one against Brooklyn.
“I don’t hardly lay that up against the tie,” he said afterwards. “You see, Mac put all those youngsters into it, and I didn’t get any support.”
Analyzing is a distasteful pastime to me, but let’s see what it was that made Ames win. Was it the necktie? Perhaps not. But some sliver of confidence, which resulted from that first game when he was dressed up in the scarf and the four-leaf clover, got stuck in his mind. And after that the rest was easy.