ANAHEIM, CA—Following John Lackey’s most recent win, teammates on the Angels revealed that one of the superstitious starting pitcher’s most prominent pre-game rituals is to design, construct, and demolish a luxury hotel before he takes the mound. “I can’t even talk to him before a game because he’s just so focused on installing the hotel’s final brick, attending its ribbon-cutting ceremony, and then scanning its structural integrity for implosion points,” said teammate Chone Figgins, who occasionally helps out by placing a call to his builder cousin for a good rate on poured concrete. “You can always tell [Lackey]’s going to have a bad start if he doesn’t get the hotel up to code in time, or can’t set off all the detonator charges in the right order before the game starts.” When asked for an assessment of the hotels, Figgins said they were “pretty tacky.”
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