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Baseball is obsessed with curses: the Curse of the Babe, the Curse of the Billy Goat, the Curse of Mark Prior's Right Shoulder. We're wondering if there's another curse the baseball faithful should be considering: The Curse of the Devil.

Consider this: Over the Tampa Bay Rays' 10 previous seasons, they have never posted a winning record, much less earned a play-off berth. What's the difference this year? They have lost the "Devil" that used to be in their name (the "Devil Rays") and arguably gained a 10th man on their team: the big guy upstairs.

As we see it, the Devil Ray Curse began in 1998 when God decided that so long as the Rays bear the name of his adversary, the team shall reside in baseball's Lake of Fire (which theologians believe is somewhere behind the Baltimore Orioles in the AL East standings).

Lo and behold, the team dropped the "Devil," and God looked once again upon the Rays and saw that they were good. Right?

Click here to read our investigation into the Devil Rays curse, featuring the perspectives of real clergy.


Baseball Curses

    Curse of the Bambino: In perhaps the most famous case of bad baseball juju, a series win evaded the Red Sox after trading Babe Ruth to the Yankees in 1918.
    Hex or Hoax:The Sox swept the series in 2004 and again in 2007, but that's nothing to the 26 pennants won by the Yankees during the 86-year dry spell.

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    Tampa's "Devil" Hex: A few fundamentalist fans claimed that the Tampa Bay Devil Rays franchise would never take off until it ditched the demonic moniker.
    Hex or Hoax: The team exorcised the "devil" and changed its name to the Rays in 2008, the same year it clinched its first division title.

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    The Curse of the Billy Goat: Legend has it that a Greek immigrant and his goat who were turned away from a 1945 championship game against Detroit placed a hex on the Cubs.
    Hex or Hoax: Chicago fans have endured fall-classic heartbreak for a century.

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    The California Curse: Forget mudslides and quakes. Cali's worst luck has been visited on sports fans: any team with "California" in its name has famously failed to fare well on and off the field.
    Hex or Hoax: The Angels won a pennant only after their jerseys read "Anaheim" in 2002.

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    The Curse of the Black Sox: The White Sox went pennantless for decades, and many blamed bad karma brought on when the ballclub infamously threw the 1919 World Series.
    Hex or Hoax: The curse was reversed in 2005, when Chicago dispatched Houston in an October blowout.

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    The Curse of Billy Penn: Legend has it that Philadelphia has been cursed since the Carter administration, when the city broke a municipal tradition that kept the maximum skyscraper height lower than a statue of William Penn atop City Hall.
    Hex or Hoax: The Phillies haven't won a pennant since 1980.

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    The Curse of Rocky Colavito: Fans, players, and allegedly, a gypsy were crushed when the Indians inexplicably traded local hero Rocky Colavito in 1959.
    Hex or Hoax: Cleveland holds the unfortuante distinction of having the longest pennant drought in baseball history.

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    The Curse of Coogan's Bluff: A hex was allegedly placed on the Giants by angry New Yorkers following their 1957 move to California.
    Hex or Hoax: The curse was thrown into sharp relief when San Francisco's 1989 whack at the pennant was disrupted by an earthquake (which was much less likely to have occurred back in Harlem).

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    The (Attempted) Curse of Papi: During the building of the new Yankee stadium, a construction worker buried a David Ortiz jersey in the fresh concrete.
    Hex or Hoax: We'll never know. Another laborer alerted the authorities, and Yanks president Randy Levine ordered the excavation of the shirt in April 2008.

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"Most Christians identify the Devil as someone who affects your life in a negative way," says Pastor Kyle Slater of Lake Carroll Baptist Church in Tampa. "Until this year, something negative was certainly affecting the Rays."

Sure, that something negative might have manifested itself through the numbskull management of original owner Vince Naimoli. It could have been the hideous old uniforms. It could have been that the Tropicana Field air conditioner wasn't turned up high enough. The Lord works in mysterious ways, who are we to say?

Mark Saunders, pastor of Bay Life Church in Brandon, Fla., apparently thinks he knows how the lord works better than we do. "I know I'm supposed to say, 'Yes, the name change is important,' but I think there are so many other fish to fry in the theological-spiritual realm."

Saunders, a Red Sox fan by birth, has a different theory as to why the Rays are kicking his beloved BoSox this year.

"I think it has a little bit more to do with them building a pretty good minor league system and those guys coming of age, than the name change," he says. "And besides, the Duke Blue Devils seem to be doing okay."

OK, pastor, but curses have been built on dumber ideas. Take, for instance, the reigning granddaddy of Major League hexes, the Chicago Cubs' Curse of the Billy Goat. In 1945, tavern owner William Sianis tried to bring his pet goat with him to Game 4 of the World Series at Wrigley Field. Cubs owners refused to let the animal inside, on account of it being smelly and, you know, an animal. Sianis, enraged, stood outside the gate and shouted "The Cubs ain't gonna win no more!"

That's it. A pissed-off fan yells something, and the Cubs go 62 years and counting without another pennant. Next to this kind of thinking, the idea of the Rays taking shrapnel in a biblical war between good and evil seems downright sensible.

Or at least that some solid praying helped with developing promising young talent and making significant front-office changes. In a world where the people talk about the wrath of a drunk guy with a goat as if it actually means something, the wrath of an angry God seems much more plausible.