The other night I phoned my father — 1,300 miles away in Minneapolis — and he casually mentioned five minutes into our conversation that the Twins were beating the Royals 3-0 in the 7th. “It’s a meaningless game,” he acknowledged, “but there’s nothing else on.”

We spoke for ten more minutes about other things, and when I finally hung up the phone I saw on the ESPN ticker that the Twins had lost 9-5 to Kansas City. So I called my dad back and asked him how the Twins could possibly be up 3-0 when their game was evidently over and they had in fact lost. He replied, “They lost the first game of a doubleheader. I’m watching the second game. And now the Twins are up 5-0 in the eighth.”

Fair enough. But when I hung up the phone for the second time, the ticker said, to my astonishment, that Scott Baker of the Twins was throwing a perfect game through eight innings. So I called my dad back and said, “In two separate conversations about the ‘meaningless’ Twins game you’re watching, you didn’t think to mention that Baker is throwing a perfect game?”

There was a long pause on the other end of the line, after which my 73-year-old father — alone in his condo, half a continent away, sounding like a chastened child — said: “I didn’t want to jinx it.”