Squirrel voodoo?

Jere Longman has an article in The New York Times about baseball:

Fans in St. Louis hadn't seen anything this elusive at Busch Stadium since Lou Brock or, come to think of it, anything this furry since Al Hrabosky.
In the fifth inning of Game Four of the National League division series, a squirrel darted across home plate, distracting Phillies pitcher Roy Oswalt, and presaging a scampering home-run rally by the Cardinals.
St. Louis won, 5-3, to force a decisive Game Five on Friday. If the Phillies did not have enough to worry about— like the suddenly dormant bat of Ryan Howard— they now have to contend with a rally squirrel with a Twitter account.
“I may make it to Philly,” the squirrel tweeted. But, given the famously querulous nature of Philadelphia fans, it added: “Am going to stay out of sight for my own safety.”
Tony La Russa, the Cardinals’ manager, said he fully expected Rally Squirrel to attend Game Five. In case of rain, he said, “maybe he’ll have a suite.”
June Cantor, a spokeswoman for the Philadelphia Streets Department, said she could not comment on whether any laws prohibited the transportation of rodents across state lines for purposes of supporting a playoff baseball team. She did have a suggestion, though, for keeping Rally Squirrel out of Citizens Bank Park. “Maybe they could have lots of acorns and peanuts outside the stadium to lure him out,” Cantor said.
Despite their recent ascendance, the Phillies have lost more games than any franchise in professional sports. Defeat through the years has come in the most exotic and excruciating ways, so a squirrel jinx would fit right in with this team’s agonizing history, and there is a baseball precedent.
In August of 2007, a squirrel clambered up and down the right-field foul pole in Yankee Stadium during a game with the Red Sox. To some, this recalled the legend of Ratatoskr, a squirrel from thirteenth-century Norse mythology that scurried along a tree representing the world, instigating a rivalry between an evil dragon at the bottom of the tree and an eagle perched on top.
“The dragon will destroy the world in Norse mythology,” Roberta Frank, a professor of Old Norse and Old English at Yale, told The New York Times that summer. Sure enough, the evil dragon, representing the Red Sox, prevailed over the eagle, representing the Yankees, as Boston won its second World Series in four seasons.
The current squirrel (or squirrels) in question first made an appearance in Game Three in St. Louis. Nobody knew where the rodent came from, whether it had season tickets, or was just angling for a cameo on Animal Planet. Perhaps it had scurried up the Mississippi basin from Louisiana’s Cajun country, where squirrel hunting season opened last weekend and a careless animal might end up in a bowl of gumbo. “It was probably seeking political asylum,” said Tim Fontenot, a physical therapist from Ville Platte, Louisianaa.
The squirrel briefly delayed Game Three as it darted across the field and capered in foul territory along the third-base line. “We need to win,” the squirrel tweeted. “I’m not ready to hibernate yet.”
In the end, there was no squirrel sustenance as the Cardinals lost, 3-2. Yet, if the furry critter had ever found a welcoming place, Busch Stadium was it, as La Russa is an animal rescue advocate.
“There’s a squirrel on the field at Busch Stadium,” a St. Louis fan named Matt Sebek tweeted Tuesday: “96% chance it sleeps at La Russa’s tonight.” To which La Russa’s daughter, Bianca, replied: “I’d say 98%.”
Wednesday, a squirrel paid another visit. It was difficult to tell whether this was the same squirrel; unlike players, rodents don’t wear names on their backs. This time, Skip Schumaker stood at bat in the fifth with the Cardinals holding a 3-2 lead. The count was 1-1 when the squirrel bolted from the St. Louis dugout and crossed the plate shortly after Oswalt’s pitch.
“Not sure that’s covered in the rule book, varmints running on the field,” commentator Bob Brenly said on TBS.
The pitch was called a ball by home plate umpire Angel Hernandez. Oswalt gestured as if he wanted a no-pitch. “I was wondering what size animal it needed to be” for a do-over, Oswalt explained. “I got distracted. I didn’t really know that would be a pitch. If it ran up the guy’s leg, would he have called the pitch for a strike? It’s hard to say.”
Hernandez saw no obstruction. The count moved to 2-1. As Brenly said: “Unless the squirrel called timeout as it ran by, that’s a live ball.”
Schumaker flied out on the next pitch, but an inning later, David Freese homered to center field with Matt Holliday on base. The Cardinals’ lead expanded to 5-2. Afterward, Charlie Manuel, the Phillies’ manager who grew up in Virginia, said he wished he had been armed with something more than a Louisville Slugger. “Being from the South and being a squirrel hunter, if I had a gun there, I might have did something,” Manuel said. “I’m a pretty good shot.”
In an interview with The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Rally Squirrel insisted that Holliday had urged him to charge the plate. “He said there were sunflower seeds in it for me.” By Thursday afternoon, Rally Squirrel had eleven thousand followers on Twitter, and a news conference had been called at Busch Stadium to explain how a rodent got in without credentials. With that, Rally Squirrel entered baseball lore, along with other animal encounters, including the black cat that sauntered past the Cubs’ dugout at Shea Stadium during a futile pennant chase in 1969, and the midges that swarmed Joba Chamberlain in Cleveland during a 2007 playoff game.
Then there is the proverbial minor league animal story, said Bob Waterman of the Elias Sports Bureau: “A pig runs across the outfield, grabs the ball, and the batter ends up with an inside-the-pork home run.”

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