NBA Hall of Famer Charles Barkley never played Major League Baseball, but he likely would appreciate the sport’s weird-yet-practical culture of superstition.
Especially after hearing how Seattle Mariners slugger Cal Raleigh did his laundry this week to help break a long hitless streak. Raleigh hit the showers, still wearing his uniform. On Tuesday night, he went 2-for-4 with a walk and three runs scored. Not being a professional athlete makes it hard to articulate the cause and effect, but here goes.
First off, let’s go back about three years. Broadcasting the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, Barkley earnestly told an unintentionally hilarious story from the 1980s that went viral. Barkley claimed that early in his NBA career he used to shower after certain games while still wearing his Philadelphia 76ers game uniform.
Barkley said he practiced this method, more than once, on nights with back-to-back games when the team was traveling in order to save time and clean everything at once. Really. It was no joke, even though Barkley’s story sent the rest of the March Madness studio crew into stitches. NBA teams used to fly commercial, which could cause a time crunch, at least in Barkley’s mind, and you can’t play in a sweaty tank top and shorts the next night. Still, doing your own laundry — while wearing it? It’s hard to imagine Michael Jordan taking this kind of shortcut. The only way to take it further would be driving a convertible with the top down through a car wash while wearing your NBA uniform.
Kenny Smith, whose own NBA career began not long after Barkley’s, interrupted Sir Charles at one point and said: “Time out. There’s no era where you did this. You’re making this up.”
It turns out Barkley wasn’t making it up. And Raleigh’s story, while less outrageous than Barkley’s, also could sound made up to future peoples. Just a season ago, Raleigh was an AL MVP candidate who hit 60 home runs and finished with one of the best performances ever by a catcher. Raleigh’s 2026 season hasn’t picked up where he left off. Big Dumper has just been down in the dumps.
Further, any ballplayer mired in a deep slump can find themselves at the mercy of well-meaning teammates advising them how to break out. Swing tips. Mental tips. Other tips, many of which are not advisable to try, or are even repeatable in public as anecdotes.
There’s also silly, superstitious kind of tips that you find in baseball when players want to change their luck. Right-hander Logan Gilbert offered this suggestion to Raleigh:
Shower in your uniform to wash the stank off.
Mired in the worst slump of his career and one of the worst in Mariners history, Raleigh resisted Gilbert at first — probably because there’s no actual relationship between how a uniform is washed and breaking a slump.
But it’s also true that nobody really knows how the universe works. Disrupting the natural flow of events and doing something out of order, even if it’s unrelated to swinging a bat and getting a hit, just might tweak fate a little. The great pro athletes take matters into their own hands. It’s what Barkley did with the galaxy-brain solution to take laundry showers when he didn’t have to.
So, with Raleigh’s slash line dropping to .157/.238/.320 on the season, he relented and hit the showers without getting naked first. Early results the next game were not encouraging. Raleigh drew a walk in his first plate appearance, but he still had zero hits through six innings — not counting a foul tip he took between the legs crouching behind the plate. “Did I shower fully clothed for nothing?” he probably wondered while resting on his knees for a minute, waiting for the terrible ache to subside.
Undeterred, he stayed in the game and ended the futility in the seventh with a sharp single. The next thing to do is wait for taking uniformed showers to become a trend. Barkley apparently had no luck doing it in the NBA, but those athletes aren’t as gifted when handling superstitions. Raleigh might create a new “wear ‘n’ wash” era in MLB, which could spread across multiple sports if his slump-busting cleanse goes viral.
