

(By Dan Steinberg / The Washington Post)

I was still walking to the office on Tuesday morning when a reader tweeted me a photo of the ingredients that go into Matt LeCroy’s lucky banana-mayo-and-white-bread sandwich. (The ingredients are banana, mayonnaise and white bread.)

Then it finally occurred to me, like a bolt: I should probably try a banana-mayo-and-white-bread sandwich. In the interest of journalism. You wouldn’t trust a writer’s opinion on football if he had never tossed a Nerf product in his driveway when he was 10 years old, after all.

I had already passed the local CVS, so I called my co-worker Kelyn and asked him to pick up some white bread and mayo. This actually required trips to two different CVS locations. (Meaning two different receipts. Accounting is gonna love this.)

Then I grabbed a couple of bananas and a plate from the Washington Post cafeteria (just one plate, since I found out they cost 25 cents each), and we were ready to go.

LeCroy, of course, is the Nats’ bullpen coach, who this year brought to the big leagues his Class A superstition of eating a banana-mayo-and-white-bread-sandwich when his team really, really needs a win.

“You can’t go to it all the time,” he told James Wagner midway through the season. “If you go to it too much, it doesn’t work.”

Then he got to talking about the sandwich on 106.7 The Fan. He was asked if fans should also partake.

“Hey I want everybody on it,” LeCroy told Grant Paulsen and Danny Rouhier. “We need to win the whole thing. Let’s do it. Let’s everybody do it.”

And every time LeCroy ate the delicacy, the Nats won. He was 7-0 entering this week. Before Game 3 in San Francisco, the Nats surely needed a win. So LeCroy ate the sandwich, for the eighth time.

“We gotta go, baby,” LeCroy told Wagner. “Hoping to make it eight.” The Nats did.

Not to be lost in all the shuffle: Matt LeCroy is now 8-0 when eating a banana-mayo sandwich this year. The real hero today. — James Wagner (@ByJamesWagner) October 7, 2014

Inside The Post newsroom, I figured I should share my bounty. So I offered up some delicious sandwichy treats to all my sports colleagues, plus The Fix’s Chris Cillizza, White House reporter David Nakamura, managing editors Kevin Merida and Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, and senior editor Cory Haik.

EVERYONE LOVED IT.

I just ate a bite of a banana and mayo sandwich. I am going to be sick. — Chris Cillizza (@CillizzaCNN) October 7, 2014

Well, not really. But I sure did. The farinaceous slices of banana slide around on a slippery layer of tangy mayo, combining in one perfectly creamy blend, and then the white bread humbly finishes off the trio — you hardly know it’s there, but you’d miss it if it were gone. I’ve already eaten more than two sandwiches as I type, and the rest of this jar of mayo isn’t going to eat itself.

And so I wasn’t alone on Tuesday. Surely stores around the area were frantically stocking their shelves with more mayo, more bananas, and more white bread. Let’s do this, everyone. We can experience high culture and sports at the same time.