Wily Mo Pena Loves the Taste of Pine Tar in the Morning

I've always been a sucker for baseball players with a dash of eccentricity. Sure, Wade Boggs was a great hitter, but he didn't become a true star in my eyes until he dropped that story about eating plates of chicken before every game (and, honestly, that one about him willing himself invisible to avoid a mugger is pretty friggin' cool, too).

Today's Boston Globe has a great piece on player superstitions, which includes Boggs' chicken fetish along with some other well-known classics, like Nomar Garciaparra's near-OC bat-tapping and glove-adjusting and Mark Fidrych talking to his baseballs.

But by far the most bizarre -- and somewhat disturbing -- is the revelation that Wily Mo Pena damn near fellates his Louisville Slugger before each and every at bat:

Outfielder Wily Mo Peña has the wackiest. In the on-deck circle, he sniffs the pine tar on the handle of his black, 35-inch model C43 Louisville Slugger. He starts at the handle and slowly moves toward the barrel. When he gets near the meat of the bat, he opens his mouth and grips the bat as if he's being fitted for a mouthpiece.

"I bite it with my teeth and give it a kiss," he says.

Now he's ready to hit.

"The umpire says, 'What the hell are you doing?' Everybody goes, 'Why did you do that?' And I don't know. It's just something I always do. I don't really taste it. I just give it a little grip with my teeth."

Not exactly the sort of thing I needed to know about Wily Mo. But if any of the girls on the Georgia State softball team wanna take up this practice, I'm betting ratings for women's softball would go through the roof.