Posted on 16th Nov 2011 @ 11:57 AM

Baseball players are famously superstitious and do a lot of weird things to up their chances of a winning streak. We've all heard about players who wear the same socks for weeks in a row, or refuse to cut their hair or shave until their luck turns. Less hygienically noxious but equally odd: the titanium-infused ropes some players have taken to wearing while they play ball.

Invented by a Japanese company called Phiten, the ropes are supposed to reduce the chance of injury by stabilizing wearers' electrical field. The theory is that players, who are obviously more active than the folks who sit around at home watching their antics on their big-screen TV, regularly disrupt their energy fields by exercising strenuously.

If that sounds bananas, get ready for the really crazy part: Phiten claims that these ropes, specially infused with titanium via a process that they invented, somehow keep wearers' bio-electric currents from being disrupted, which in turn prevents athletes from being injured, imbues people of all athletic ability with more energy, and can even help carpal tunnel sufferers reduce their pain.

Anyone with carpal tunnel syndrome will tell you that they'd do almost anything to feel a little bit better. There's very little more annoying than the constant zinging and twinging of carpal tunnel pain. Every year, people buy pricey ergonomic chairs, rack up huge doctor's bills, and undergo painful and expensive surgery in order to seek some relief. Not so strange, then, that some are willing to pay $40 or so on something that Randy Johnson claims helps him recover faster from the rigors of pitching.

Of course, the real question is, does it work? Scientists are skeptical, to put it mildly.

"There’s no science and physiology," said Dr. Orrin Sherman, chief of sports medicine at the New York University Hospital for Joint Diseases. "There's just no way the chemical structure of the body can be influenced by magnets that small. It's all superstitions with no scientific basis."

But perhaps more persuasively to our friends on the field, there are plenty of baseball players who have tried Phiten and found it lacking.

"I tried it when I pitched on Sunday and I lost, so, needless to say, I'll never wear it again," said Mets pitcher Tom Glavine in 2005.

Image: Skeptico.blogs.com