Perhaps you have given yourself over to Cucumber Season and are not paying attention to the dog days of the baseball season. It may then come as news to you that they're touching it. They're all touching it, all the time, and it is working.
After losing 12 of 13, Tigers outfielder Riley Greene shaved off his beard but left his mustache, and since then Detroit has won three straight. Are these two things related? Is the mustache winning baseball games? Who can say. One thing we can say with absolute certainty is that they are touching it, early and often.
"A lot of people touched it today," Greene said after Tuesday's win over the Diamondbacks.
Who specifically? Zach McKinstry did it before homering. "He touched it," Greene said. Gleyber Torres touched it before and after homering. "A lot of people have," Greene said.
the power of the mustache ‼️ pic.twitter.com/qPi4I2ZqxR
— Detroit Tigers (@tigers) July 30, 2025
They're touching it, and they're enjoying touching it. Any chance they get to touch it, they're taking. "It gets the boys going," Greene said of the touching.
They love touching it! Can't get enough of it. But surely you have questions about the manner in which they are touching it. Do they warn Greene before touching it? No, he said, they just touch it.
Is there anyone who hasn't touched it? "We've all touched it," manager AJ Hinch said.
Does that mean Hinch has touched it himself? "He has," Greene said. "Twice."
Perhaps there is an observation to be made on the nature of a baseball season, which is long and fluky and statistically likely to produce stretches of both good and bad play with no clear explanation for either; or the nature of baseball players, who in the absence of said explanations will eagerly seize upon whatever superstition stumbles into their field of vision; or about how, given the communal and emotional nature of a baseball team, these superstitions, because of their facility for helping teammates bond, may actually end up having some unquantifiable competitive value in a sport where confidence and joy are performance enhancers. This blog will not be making those observations. This blog is about how they're touching it.
And about where, exactly, on the mustache they are touching it, and under what circumstances the touching is happening.
“They’re touching it everywhere, wherever they want to," Greene said.
