MLB history is full of moments preserved by box scores, photographs, radio calls, and grainy film. Then there are the stories that live somewhere between documented fact and clubhouse folklore. They have been repeated for decades, sometimes with enough evidence to seem plausible but rarely enough to settle the argument for good.
Some involve superhuman athletic feats. Others concern bizarre decisions, dangerous incidents, or events so strange that they would be difficult to believe in a movie. Here are 10 of the most unbelievable myths and legends to emerge from Major League Baseball.
10. Billy Martin Picked His Starting Lineup Out of a Hat
Billy Martin had plenty of unconventional methods during his turbulent managerial career, but few were stranger than reportedly allowing chance to determine his batting order.
There are multiple accounts of Martin pulling players’ names from a hat when his teams were struggling. One of the best-known examples came with the New York Yankees in 1977.
Expectations surrounding the defending American League champions were enormous, yet the Yankees stumbled to a 3-8 start. Before an April 21 game, Martin reportedly randomized his lineup by drawing names from a hat.
Then the Yankees started winning.
They went on a stretch in which they won 13 of 15 games. Whether the hat had anything to do with that turnaround is another matter, but it certainly made for a good story.
Martin later tried the approach while managing the Oakland Athletics. That experiment was less successful. Rickey Henderson, one of baseball’s greatest leadoff hitters, wound up batting eighth, reportedly the only time he started a game from that position. Oakland was shut out.
Sometimes randomness produces magic. Sometimes it puts Rickey Henderson eighth and gets you zero runs.
9. Bo Jackson Hit a 450-Foot Home Run Left-Handed
The idea of Bo Jackson hitting a baseball 450 feet requires little imagination.
Jackson’s power was spectacular. He demonstrated it repeatedly during his MLB career, including his memorable home run in the 1989 All-Star Game.
The strange part of this particular story isn’t the distance.
It’s that Jackson supposedly did it left-handed.
Jackson normally batted right-handed, but a long-running story claims he once stepped into the opposite batter’s box in Minnesota and launched a ball approximately 450 feet.
Baseball writer Peter Gammons was reportedly there to witness it, according to an account relayed by Joe Posnanski.
There isn’t the sort of video evidence that would settle the matter instantly today. Instead, the story survives largely because the alleged witness was a respected baseball reporter and because the player involved was Bo Jackson.
If there was anyone capable of producing an athletic feat that sounded fabricated afterward, Jackson was a pretty convincing candidate.
8. Moises Alou Urinated on His Hands
This one sounds like baseball folklore, except Moises Alou openly discussed it.
Alou disliked wearing batting gloves. Instead, he said he urinated on his hands because he believed the practice helped prevent calluses and toughened his skin.
Former Yankees catcher Jorge Posada was also associated with the practice.
There is some disagreement over whether the supposed science behind it makes sense. Urine contains urea, which is used in some skin-care products as a moisturizer and softener. That doesn’t exactly support the idea that the practice would harden someone’s hands.
But baseball has never required its rituals to survive scientific scrutiny.
Alou certainly had no trouble hitting. Over 17 major-league seasons, he produced a .303 batting average, .369 on-base percentage and .516 slugging percentage while hitting 332 home runs.
Whether his unusual hand-care routine helped is another question entirely.
7. Mark Ellis Nearly Lost His Leg
This story didn’t begin as a legend. It began with an apparently ordinary baseball collision.
In May 2012, Los Angeles Dodgers second baseman Mark Ellis was injured when St. Louis Cardinals infielder Tyler Greene slid into him while breaking up a double play.
The initial description of an “undisclosed leg injury” hardly captured what was happening.
Ellis required emergency surgery after developing serious complications in his lower leg. Dodgers manager Don Mattingly later described what team physician Neal ElAttrache had told him about the severity of the situation.
Blood was not reaching the affected muscle properly, increasing the risk of permanent tissue damage. According to Mattingly’s account, another six or seven hours could have put Ellis at risk of losing part of his leg.
Instead, doctors intervened in time.
Ellis missed nearly seven weeks and eventually returned to the Dodgers’ lineup.
A routine-looking baseball play had come frighteningly close to producing a completely different outcome.
6. Ty Cobb Sharpened His Spikes to Injure Opponents
Few baseball players have accumulated as many dark stories as Ty Cobb.
One of the most persistent claims is that Cobb deliberately sharpened his metal spikes before games so they would inflict greater damage when he slid into a base.
The image fits perfectly with the version of Cobb that became entrenched in baseball mythology: aggressive, hostile, and willing to intimidate anyone standing between him and a base.
But the sharpening story has never been firmly established.
Accounts have suggested that the rumor itself may have been useful to Cobb. Opposing infielders who believed his spikes had been sharpened might have been considerably less enthusiastic about blocking a base when he came sliding toward them.
That distinction matters. Cobb unquestionably played an aggressive style of baseball, but a story repeated often enough can eventually become indistinguishable from a documented event.
More than a century later, the sharpened-spikes claim remains one of the most famous examples.
5. Jose Canseco Ran a 3.9-Second 40-Yard Dash
Jose Canseco’s career already provided enough remarkable numbers without adding this one.
Canseco combined extraordinary power with unusual speed, becoming the first MLB player to hit 40 home runs and steal 40 bases in the same season when he accomplished the feat in 1988.
But Canseco also claimed he once ran the 40-yard dash in 3.9 seconds.
That’s where skepticism becomes unavoidable.
Bo Jackson has long been associated with an unofficial 4.12-second 40, an extraordinary figure in itself. A 3.9-second run would put Canseco in almost absurd athletic territory.
There are also obvious problems with comparing old hand-timed runs to modern electronically measured performances. Timing methods can produce significant differences, particularly when discussing tenths of a second.
Canseco was unquestionably fast for a player carrying his combination of size and power.
Whether he was 3.9 seconds fast is why the claim belongs among baseball’s great legends rather than its settled records.
4. Shoeless Joe Jackson Was Innocent in the Black Sox Scandal
More than a century after the 1919 World Series, Shoeless Joe Jackson’s role in the Black Sox scandal remains one of baseball’s most argued historical questions.
Several Chicago White Sox players were accused of participating in a scheme to intentionally lose the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds.
Jackson was among the eight players ultimately banned from organized baseball for life by Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis.
Yet Jackson’s performance in the series has long fueled arguments that his individual play didn’t look like that of a man deliberately trying to lose.
He batted .375 with a .394 on-base percentage and .563 slugging percentage. He also drove in six runs and played all eight games.
Those numbers alone don’t resolve the question of what Jackson knew, agreed to, accepted, or intended. The historical record surrounding the scandal is considerably more complicated than a batting line.
Jackson maintained that he had not received a fair outcome. In an interview later published by sportswriter Furman Bisher, Jackson said he believed Landis might restore him after his trial but that he refused to plead for reinstatement.
The ban remained in place for the rest of Jackson’s life.
And the argument never really ended.
3. Babe Ruth Called His Shot
It’s one of the most recognizable scenes in baseball mythology.
Game 3 of the 1932 World Series—Babe Ruth at the plate against the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field. Ruth makes a pointing gesture toward the outfield.
Then he hits a home run.
From that sequence came the legend of Babe Ruth’s “called shot” — the claim that Ruth deliberately pointed toward the spot where he intended to hit the ball before doing exactly that.
The home run unquestionably happened. The gesture happened, too.
What Ruth meant by it is the mystery.
Accounts from people at the game differed. Some believed Ruth was pointing toward center field. Others thought he was gesturing toward the Cubs dugout, pitcher Charlie Root, or simply responding to heckling.
Even Ruth’s own later descriptions weren’t enough to erase the uncertainty.
That ambiguity has probably helped the story survive. If film clearly showed Ruth announcing his intentions, there would be nothing left to debate. If it clearly showed him doing something else, the legend might have disappeared.
Instead, baseball inherited just enough evidence to keep arguing.
2. Dock Ellis Threw a No-Hitter While on LSD
Of all the stories on this list, this may be the one that sounds most obviously invented.
Dock Ellis said it happened.
On June 12, 1970, Ellis started for the Pittsburgh Pirates against the San Diego Padres. Years later, he described taking LSD earlier that day because he had lost track of his pitching schedule and initially believed he wasn’t supposed to start.
Then he discovered he had to pitch.
Ellis later gave extraordinary descriptions of trying to navigate the game while under the effects of the drug, including difficulty seeing hitters and feeling the baseball.
His command that afternoon certainly wasn’t pristine. Ellis walked eight batters and hit another.
What he didn’t allow was a hit.
Pittsburgh won 2-0, and Ellis completed one of the strangest no-hitters in major-league history.
No test or contemporaneous documentation can independently establish Ellis’ drug use that day. The account came from Ellis himself years afterward.
The no-hitter, however, is sitting right there in the record book.
1. The Curse of the Billy Goat
For decades, Chicago Cubs fans had a supernatural explanation available whenever another season ended in disappointment.
The story originated during the 1945 World Series.
William “Billy Goat” Sianis, owner of Chicago’s Billy Goat Tavern, reportedly brought his pet goat to Wrigley Field. Sianis and the goat were eventually asked to leave, with the animal’s odor commonly cited as the reason.
What happened next became legend.
Sianis supposedly declared that the Cubs would never win again at Wrigley Field or win another World Series, depending on which version of the story is told.
For generations, the results seemed almost determined to keep the tale alive.
The Cubs didn’t return to the World Series for 71 years. Along the way came a remarkable collection of painful defeats and near misses, each providing another opportunity to invoke the goat.
There is, however, one major problem with treating the curse as an ongoing concern.
The Cubs finally won the World Series in 2016, defeating the Cleveland Indians in seven games and ending a championship drought that stretched back to 1908.
Whatever power Billy Sianis and his goat supposedly possessed, it eventually ran out.
The legend survived anyway. Baseball has always had room for statistics and superstition at the same time, and few stories demonstrate that better than a goat being blamed for 71 years without a pennant.
