This story is part of Peak, The Athletic’s desk covering the mental side of sports. Sign up for Peak’s newsletter here.Having just recorded his first strikeout of the Big Ten baseball tournament championship, UCLA freshman pitcher Angel Cervantes flexed both arms and let out a primal yell.Then he reached down and picked up a toy dinosaur named Jerry.The scene repeated itself in the third inning, when Cervantes struck out another batter and reached down for Jerry before carrying the toy back to the dugout. Then again in the fourth.For five innings on Sunday, Cervantes held Oregon scoreless, helping No. 1 UCLA to a Big Ten championship. All the while, Jerry stood watch on the back of the mound.The image — a toy dinosaur grazing on the mound, like a zebra in the Serengeti — was strange enough that the Big Ten network broadcast took notice, highlighting a routine that Cervantes began in high school.It also left Cervantes, one of the top freshman prospects in the country, a little sheepish during a postgame interview.“He calms me down,” Cervantes told Noah Darling. “I know it might sound, like, childish, but I mean, whatever works for you and that’s what works for me. So he’s going to be here for a long time.”Research in the field of psychology has suggested that Cervantes may be being too hard on himself.In 2010, a group of researchers at the University of Cologne published a study that found that good-luck rituals and superstitions may improve performance because they increase a person’s sense of self-efficacy — or their confidence in their ability to succeed.That may sound simple or obvious. But the researchers, who were affiliated with the university’s psychology department, ran a series of experiments that tested the idea in different ways.One included subjects who were told they were using a “lucky” golf ball while putting (the control group was told nothing). Another included a group of participants who were told the German equivalent of “I’m keeping my fingers crossed for you” while completing a coordination task. A third experiment involved participants who brought their lucky charm to the lab (half of the group then had theirs taken away) before engaging in a memory game.Across those three tasks, participants who engaged in superstition — who believed they were using a lucky ball or possessed a lucky charm — performed better than those who did not. In the third experiment, they also expressed more confidence before their performance.