Sometimes I think baseball has more “unwritten rules” than it has rules. Maybe it’s because baseball players are a strange and superstitious bunch.

Folks in the dugout never congratulate the pitcher in the middle of a game about a throwing a no-hitter. And under ABSOLUTELY NO CIRCUMSTANCES does anyone even speak the words “perfect game.” Doing so would instantly jinx not only the pitcher but also every one in the dugout and more than likely the entire home side of the stands.

In two decades of covering high school sports, it was always funny watching the players in the dugout trying their best NOT to say anything, but still point out the obvious to teammates.

All this has been on my mind for about a month but not because of pitching prowess. Instead, it was about inclement weather. More to the point, it was about the lack of really bad weather. I was afraid to use the word “hurricane.”

I arrived in Baldwin County around Labor Day in 2012. Hurricane Isaac blew through the week before. I was pulling a Uhaul trailer behind a 16-year-old pickup through the remnants, but that’s another story.

When I decided to move here, I was sort of worried about the possibility of a hurricane. Would I have to pick up and evacuate? Would I have to stay and report the news? Would Kathy and Marcus head to safety while I stayed? Having to buy a separate home insurance policy for named storms didn’t help any.

But we made it through the rest of 2012 without another hurricane heading toward Lower Alabama. And since the 2013 hurricane season started in June, the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean have been surprisingly quiet. I wanted to make a comment that there had not been a named storm since I arrived. But I didn’t want to jinx it.

On top of that, nobody had been talking about hurricanes. Whenever one formed or tried to form, the weather folks on television would show the projected path models that showed them tracking way away from us.

Then along came Invest 97 — sounds more like a banking convention than a storm system. It slowly grew into Tropical Storm Karen and then all heck broke loose. Meteorologists started scrambling to look at the radar. Folks were predicting that somehow this little storm that had just reached TS status would grow dramatically. And just like that, the H-word was being thrown all over the place. Every hour or so, I was notified/reminded via Smartphone that we were under a Hurricane Watch.

Karen was coming and it was going to be bad. Organizers of weekend outdoor events quickly scrambled to cancel or postpone. I mean, who wants to run a 5K in the middle of a Category 1 hurricane? Folks had to be a little surprised (or maybe miffed) when they got up Saturday with nothing to do but look at more or less clear skies.

I had to be out of town and got back Sunday afternoon. As I got to Saraland, the skies looked black. A check of the radar on the cell phone showed the storm covering LA. I figured it was going to rain for a while, so I hunkered down at the office and started working on pages. I was amazed to look out a couple of hours later and see the sun shining.

If you don’t like the weather, wait 15 minutes.

Thankfully Karen did not live up to the early hype. Also, it was nice to see folks take heed of the warnings and cancel events.

And by the way, there still hasn’t been a hurricane since I got here.

William Moore is the Senior Editor at Gulf Coast Newspapers. He can be reached at wmoore@gulfcoastnewspapers.com