Curses and buried shirts: Baseball lore revisited

There seems to be a strong belief in baseball that curses really exist and work, although some of them seem to have been overcame over the past years. The best known one must have been the "Curse of the Bambino", but is there any clue as to what made the curse go away? One that apparently is still active is the "Curse of the Billy Goat" which prevents the Chicago Cubs from winning a championship in the past 100 years. In Japan the Hanshin Tigers are still waiting to win the Japan Series for a 2nd time and there a fastfood mascot is taking all the blame. The "Curse of the Colonel" is thought to prevent the team from winning since 1985 now when excited fans dropped a statue of KFC mascot Colonel Sanders into a river.
This kind of sports lore is something which makes baseball interesting to me. Legends, curses, witchcraft, that's something which adds to the fun. Fans and supporters always turn to higher powers when they are trying to explain the inexplicable. Why has my team not won a championship in a long time? Well, maybe it's not bad management or even worse players. No, it must have been a curse. There we go...
Now, it seems some people even try to force their "luck" a little bit and with the New York Yankees building a new stadium what better way to put a little flaw in the construction. A worker buried a Red Sox jersey under the visitor's dugout, told the New York Post and then the Yankees resurfaced the jersey with lots of media attention. At least this kind of child's play is one where no one gets hurt, unlike the stuff football supporters to over here.