The Curse of the Eighteenth Letter in the 2018 season

Considering it’s the eighteenth year of the century, it’s no surprise that you’ve often heard Alice Cooper’s first big hit on local early music stations. Although “Eighteen” is a song about age, it has never been more appropriate this year than in the four and a half decades since it was released on the band’s Love It To Death album.

2018 will most likely continue to be a good year for Alice Cooper and his first Top 20 single, but that number so far doesn’t look promising for some of those involved in baseball. In fact, the eighteenth letter of the alphabet has been an absolute curse for Major League Baseball teams whose names begin with R.

More than half of the basement dwellers after the first week and a half are R clubs, whose combined record has been 15-26. Those four teams, according to most predictions in sports publications, will likely finish bottom in 2018.

Of the quartet, the Rays have suffered the most. Tampa won its first game against Boston, but has since lost every game. That record currently has them looking up to the rest of the American League East.

The Royals have fared only slightly better in the AL Central, where Kansas City has managed just two wins in seven games. Their NL counterparts, the Reds, are also holding the rest of the Central to just a couple of wins.

Cincinnati provides even more evidence of the curse, a word that cannot be spelled without the R in the middle. The player who almost single-handedly led the Reds to one of their two wins with a five-RBI game against Pittsburgh, third baseman Eugenio Saura, broke his hand and will likely spend significant time on the disabled list.

Also cursed by the eighteenth card (and the misfortune of having to open the season against the World Series champion Astros) are the Rangers. Although Texas has twice as many wins as the Reds and Royals, they still rest in the basement of the American League West.

Boston has defied the curse of R so far in 2018, winning nine in a row after losing its first game. Still, fans at Fenway Park might want to refer to their club simply as the Sox, avoiding the colorful adjective that precedes it.