Earlier this month, a cat ran out onto the field at Yankee Stadium, interrupting the Yankees-Orioles game. <a href="https://www.neatorama.com/2021/08/05/Major-League-Cat/" class="on">The cat became a viral star</a>, but what happened to the teams? Since then, the Yankees have won 17 of 20 games, but the Orioles haven't won any!<blockquote>We would not still be discussing this cat three weeks later if the Orioles losing streak didn’t represent the seventh longest skid in Major League Baseball in the last 100 years. The Orioles are the worst team in baseball, so it’s possible this post-cat slide is a coincidence. At first it seemed like a fun, random event. But the fact that the O’s dropped 18 straight makes it feel like something shady is going on here. Was this cat sent by a baseball witch to curse the O’s? Let’s investigate. </blockquote>

It was far from the first time a cat on the field has delayed a game. Molly Knight researched several times a cat got onto the field during play, and how it changed the fortunes of the teams involved. There appears to be a trend showing that the teams either went on to improve their records considerably afterward, or suffered from some sort of curse. Of course, baseball fans are notoriously superstitious, and cats are constantly the subject of superstition. <a href="https://mollyknight.substack.com/p/is-a-feral-cat-responsible-for-the" class="on">Read about four such incidences and what happened to their win-loss records</a> at The Long Game. Bonus: you'll see four videos of cats interrupting baseball games.

You may wonder what happens to the cats who find viral stardom after their moment of glory on the baseball field. We know about one of them: Rally Cat, who became a sensation in St. Louis in 2017. ESPN tracked down what happened to the kitten <a href="https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/31941729/secret-life-st-louis-cardinals-legend" class="on">in a gripping and in-depth article</a>. -via <a href="https://www.metafilter.com/192442/Take-Meowt-to-the-Ballgame" class="on">Metafilter&nbsp;</a>​ #cats #baseball #MLB

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