Some people find them quaint or amusing, but I’ve always been a bit suspicious of tradition and superstition in sports, particularly baseball.

Why have some traditions continued while others were thrown out like Connie Mack’s three-piece suits?

How come fielders don’t leave their gloves on the field anymore? Why don’t the players still wear wool uniforms? Why don’t relievers come into the game riding in those bullpen carts? Why doesn’t anyone try to grow an Afro like Oscar Gamble’s or a moustache like Rollie Fingers’ anymore?

Some superstitions are dying, too, and some just never caught on in the first place. I rarely hear anyone fret about crossing bats anymore. Outside Nomar Garciaparra and that annoying glove thing he does, there aren’t any Human Rain Delays tugging at their uniforms incessantly like Mike Hargrove and Carlton Fisk used to do. I’ve always been disappointed Turk Wendell’s habit of brushing his teeth in the dugout between innings lost steam. If the entire Yankee roster adopted that one, I’d ditch the Red Sox and start rooting for the Pinstripes in a hearbeat.

Although most of these are relatively harmless, some of the superstitions are just flat-out ridiculous and do a disservice to the game.

The most recent example came Monday night, during Jon Lester’s thrilling no-hitter. You had the players in the dugout observing the regular practice of not talking to Lester. If I were the pitcher, this would drive me nuts, because it would, if anything, just make me think about pitching a no-hitter more. But since this has been a tradition for so long and is such a part of the psychology of baseball, maybe it helps the fielders – who have almost as much pressure as the pitcher on them – relax a little. No harm done.

I’m even down with the fans getting into it, too. Red Sox radio announcer Joe Castiglione told the story of a fan who was listening to the game while driving home Monday, pulled into his driveway around the seventh inning and decided to stay in his car rather than risk jinxing it by going in the house. Hey, if a guy doesn’t mind eating a cold dinner so he can play some sort of vicarious role in a no-no, more power to him, even if it’s silly to think anything he does has any bearing whatsoever on Jon Lester’s magnificent performance.

But it’s a good thing that fan was listening closely to the radio that evening, otherwise he might have unwittingly stepped out of his car and messed the whole thing up. You see, if this guy had been thinking about the rough day he’d had at work or going over in his head how he was going to explain to his wife why he was two hours late, if his mind had only tuning in and out of the game on the commute home, he probably wouldn’t have had a clue what kind of drama was unfolding at Fenway Park.

That’s because Castiglione, as well as his television counterpart on NESN, Don Orsillo, never uttered the words “no hitter.” Oh, they alluded to it, danced around it like Jason Taylor, and treated it as if their wives had asked them if a dress made their butt look big. They regularly uttered something along the lines of “Through X innings, Jon Lester has only allowed one walk and has had an error committed behind him.” or “Two Kansas City batters have reached base via walk, one on an error and one on a fielder’s choice. This could be a special night at Fenway.” The references were veiled or vague at best, almost misleading at worst.

Fans watching on television, those with their eyes glued to the screen, saw the line score at the end of every half inning, or the occasional NESN camera panning the scoreboard on the Green Monster to reveal the 0 under the H. But if you were playing solitaire, doing the dishes or reading a book, you were out of luck, buddy, because Orsillo wasn’t going to follow the word “no” with the word “hitter.” Not a chance. Not even if Jerry Remy threatened to plug his web site between every pitch for the next 150 years.

Castiglione and Orsillo are usually top-notch announcers, and they aren’t the only play-by-play guys who will follow this unwritten rule. Wherever a pitcher has a no-hitter or perfect game going through five or six innings, you can pretty much guarantee the hometown announcer is biting his tongue. You can also bet the announcers for the opposition are chanting “no hitter” in their booth and the folks in the production truck are trying to find a way to overdub the Aflac duck to say “no hitter” during the nightly trivia question.

Both sides go by the foolish notion that what they say has some impact on the game. At least those who don’t want to see history unfolding are telling their viewers or listeners what is actually going on.

Announcers usually explain their dereliction of duty with the weak jinx justification. They say they’ll hear about it from players and fans if they break this sacred superstition.

Look, I’m just as scared of getting on Julian Tavarez’s bad side as the next guy, but isn’t the job of an announcer to provide as clear and accurate a description of the action as possible? Of course, in this age of bloated sports broadcasts, you also need to be able to throw it down to Blondie so she can tell us why the manager’s daughter named her new dog Archuleta. Other than that, the whole point of someone sitting in a booth with a microphone during a game is to provide information to the viewer or listener, right?

Fans rely on announcers to tell us what we wouldn’t otherwise know. Okay, so Tim McCarver and Joe Morgan are the exceptions that prove the rule. But isn’t that why NBC’s experiment of an announcer-less football game 25 years ago didn’t revolutionize television?

The broadcast media has been so willing to break some of the other traditions of baseball (like afternoon World Series games and shorter breaks between innings). This one should have gone out with the Sunday doubleheader.