It’s better if I leave the introduction short, but prior to the Mariners-Blue Jays baseball game on Sunday, there was an oddly specific prediction made by a broadcaster. Check out this link for the details: Audio of the pick and what turned out.
This got me thinking about other examples of similarly specific and accurate predictions by players/coaches/broadcasters/reporters/management about what was going to unfold in a particular sporting game/event.
The only one I could come up with that even came close was Plaxico Burress’s prediction that the Giants would beat the heavily favored Patriots in Super Bowl XLII by a score of 23-17–the final score ended up being 17-14. Not quite, but in the ballpark.
Not a prediction. As it happens, I was talking last week to the biographer of “Marse Joe” McCarthy (manager of the Yankees at the time) and he brought up the “called shot”. He said that Ruth affirmed several times that he was actually holding up two fingers to the Cubs pitcher Charlie Root, as in “I only have two strikes on me…I still have one to go.”
I remember a fairly gutsy one by a usually ridiculed commentator. Beano Cook predicted in Week 4 of the 1985 college football season that Oklahoma would play Penn State for the national championship, a pretty bold gamble considering the Sooners had just lost to Miami, but one that was on the money.
I rashly declared on another board, when Fabio Capello was named England soccer manager, that he would lead England to their second World Cup title. We will see next year, but so far Capello has done almost everything right IMO.
While this particular prediction was pretty solid, predictions about “surprise seasons” or “sleepers” come true all the time. I was looking more for eerily specific, correct predictions about the outcomes of certain plays/games which were, before their resolution, not likely to come to fruition.
This is on the right track, but I think that guaranteeing a victory isn’t quite on the same level of prognostication that I’m talking about.
Not sure if it fits what you’re looking for, but there’s a famous Larry Bird story. Before the last play in a tied game, Larry told Xavier McDaniel, who was garding him, exactly where on the floor he was going to hit the game-winning shot from, and then did exactly that.
I don’t think you’re going to find too many to match this call from the Mariners game, partly because people rarely make such specific predictions to begin with. Gregg Easterbrook on ESPN routinely makes fun of specific predictions people make, of things like the exact final score of NFL games. Those predictions are less specific than this Mariners one, and they’re wrong basically all the time anyway.
Sports Illustrated on December 9, 1968 published a tongue-in-cheek article describing how the Jets had won the Superbowl by beating Baltimore. They had gotten there by beating the Oakland Raiders (remember, when the article was written, the league had two more games to go), who had to win a playoff game to get there (they had).
Building on that, in April, Newsday on Long Island wrote a bit of humorous fiction about how the NY Mets won the World Series over Baltimore in 1969. It was far more absurd (I remember them talking about Ron Swoboda challenging Roger Maris’s record), but it was the only place to predict a Mets World Series win that year in any context.
Related, at least: In the recent Dan Henderson - Michael Bisping fight, Joe Rogan noted that Bisping was circling toward the power right hand of Henderson, exactly what his corner had warned him against. It was the last thing said before Henderson dropped Bisping like 3rd period French.
