Mike Blowers’ “Amazing” Call Debunked

What nobody else (that I’ve seen or heard) have mentioned is that Blowers was almost certainly watching the Mariners work out earlier that day, and may have noticed that Tuiasosopo was in a groove, and was hitting some big shots to left centre during batting practice. Looks even less amazing when you figure in that possibility.

The detailed knowledge of the game that made Mike Blowers a successful major league player is also what makes him a successful colour commentator, and is what makes this “prediction” much less amazing than it seems at first blush.

Why do you sound almost grumpy here? Like someone trying to tell a 3 year old girl that “NO, you’re not really a princess and you’ll never be one.”

Just let it be a pretty cool happening at least.

A customer calls in. They have a machine that keeps restarting itself over and over, without warning, apparently at random. Immediately, I list off a number of things off the top of my head that could cause the problem. Overheating is obvious; check the cooling system. Low voltage from the power supply. Bad capacitors in the motherboard. I’ve seen the pattern over and over again in my career.

I’ve seen the symptoms before. I know the systems inside and out, and I work with them nearly every day of my career. Just like Mike Blowers can recognize patterns in baseball, because he works with them every day of his career. I even work with techs who refuse to believe me when I list the possible causes of the problem. (Usually because it mean it’s a hardware issue, and they have to pay for my opinion.)

But, it never ceases to amaze them when they open the case and find that their CPU fan is clogged with lint. I called it!

The same can be said for a doctor who recognizes a disease by noticing all the symptoms and putting the pieces together. That’s one of the reasons House is so popular. There’s nothing magic about it. We’re professionals. We know our stuff. And that in itself is astounding.

Yes, humans are hardwired to recognize patterns, and it occasionally leads us to being spot on. Or at least close enough to do a double-take. And of course we get a little thrill from being right.

Does that make it any less thrilling? Do we have to kick the magic out of every little thing? Or can we just enjoy the moment?

It’s a good call – an element of luck, sure, but still a good call.

It’s a bit like poker. You can say it’s just luck but Phil Ivey will still beat you 70% of the time.

Yeah, unless someone is seriously trying to claim he has magical powers, we should probably laud him for being good at what he does.

The commenters above had made a good point. I guess it’s just that in my experience somebody is going to hold this kind of thing up as evidence of supernatural insight, even if the guy himself doesn’t.

I would give him credit for the 3-1 count. There are twelve different possible counts in baseball. Blowers was right in guessing that it would be a 3-1 instead of 0-0 or 1-2 or 2-1 or 3-0, etc. Stop being a stick in the mud and admit he got that part right.

Awe, come on Hemant, even if it was an educated guess, it was still a good one.

We do tend to like to make more of this than we should.

Goodness, Hemant, I’m a little shocked that you, of all people, are ignoring the simple math of all these things. You’re certainly correct that Blowers missed #6, but refusing to give him credit for any of 2-5 or 7 is just… well, innumerate.

If I make an extremely detailed prediction about a particular event, the fact that each element/detail of my prediction is fairly likely–say, 40%–to come to pass doesn’t change the fact that the overall prediction is actually quite unlikely. It’s not terribly complicated math, as I’m sure you know: 40% to the seventh power is 0.16%.

So dismissing all of Blowers’ “safe” predictions is just absurd. (Especially given that perhaps three of the seven were as much as 40% likely to be correct.)

(1) In one sense, this is actually the least impressive prediction of them all, because it was evident to anyone paying attention that Tuiasosopo had never hit a home run. His first dinger was going to come at some point. But sure, it’s a big deal to have correctly picked the game in which it would be hit, presuming (as you note) Blowers hasn’t done this repeatedly.

(2) Yes, starting pitchers usually last long enough to get through the opposition’s order twice (Tuiasosopo was batting eighth for the Mariners)–but they certainly don’t always. The home run was hit in the fifth inning, and starters (especially ones who are prone to giving up dingers) are routinely knocked out before then. Blowers just reduced his chances of getting the greater prediction correct by something like 30%, but you pretend he’s done nothing.

(3) No, it’s not a big leap to think a rookie is likely to be homerless in his second at-bat. But again, Blowers has sharply narrowed his prediction–if Tuiasosopo homers in his first time up, or third or fourth, this is a miss. (In fact, Tuiasosopo was 0 for 3 the rest of the game, including striking out in the ninth with his team down a run.) Sure, Blowers “had a reason,” but that doesn’t change the fact that this one had, what, a 30% chance of succeeding? Blowers says “second at-bat,” the homer happens in the second at-bat, and you call it a miss? Because he “had a reason”? WTF?

(4) Oy! “No credit” for picking the precise count? Come on! A huge proportion of major league at-bats (especially for rookies!) never reach 3-1, much less result in a home run on that count. Yes, a solid hit is marginally more likely to result from a pitch thrown on that count than on most other counts, but it makes no sense to compare 3-1 to any other particular count–say, 1-2. The proper comparison here is the raw number of homers hit on 3-1 versus the raw number of homers hit on all of the other ball-strike counts combined; and in light of that contrast, the chances that this home run would be hit on 3-1 particularly are extremely small. Even if you think that Tuiasosopo is a rookie and is therefore more likely to take a few more pitches, that can only add a percentage point or two to the 3-1-count odds. “No credit”? Ridiculous.

(5) Sure, pitchers throw more fastballs on 3-1 than they do other pitches. Still, knocking 35%, or some similar fraction, off of Blowers’ chances of getting the greater prediction correct is not nothing. If I predict it’s going to be sunny in Phoenix tomorrow, and it is indeed sunny in Phoenix tomorrow (as was highly likely), I’m still right. It’s not a “miss,” and if I keep betting all of my money on sunny days in Phoenix, at some point that long-shot rainstorm is going to bust me.

(6) He was wrong. And Maddow probably should have noticed that.

(7) Again, batters hit homers to the opposite field (here right) all the time. They also hit them to center and down the line of their pull field. I don’t know whether Tuiasosopo is a “pull hitter”; if so, left-center is perhaps a 50-50 prediction. (If not, far worse.) “Pointing out the obvious”?!? If I walk up to the roulette wheel, bet $100 on red, and it in fact comes up red, have I merely “Point[ed] out the obvious” that it was going to come up red? Sorry, but I’m going to demand $100 from the casino whether you think it was “obvious” or not.

Yeesh. Blowers was demonstrably right on six out of the seven elements of his prediction. (2), (5), and (7) were relatively safe predictions, but that doesn’t make them “misses”; home runs are hit all the time that violate all three of those. (3) is not nearly as safe as you claim, and (4) is in fact highly improbable.

So please. The chances Blowers had of seeing six out of his seven predictions come true were extremely long-odds. (And from the audio of him making the call, it’s clear that he is not in the practice of making such detailed predictions; that’s why the other people in the booth were laughing.) Of course it makes more sense to attribute his success to dumb luck rather than, say, psychic ability, but I don’t see how it makes any sense to pretend that this wasn’t a strikingly improbable event.

The fact that you had to make this post tells us a lot about human nature. I like this comic:

http://xkcd.com/628/

I usually do it with a deck of cards, but to be honest, certain cards in a deck are chosen more often than others. And you can say things to narrow the choices they have like, “Don’t pick something like the Ace of Spades… because then you’ll think I just had that one up my sleeve or something.”

I’m going to assume that the real purpose of this post is to generate hits on your website because while the points you make are mildly interesting, I don’t see how you could see this as anything but amazing, nor why you would feel the need to “debunk” it as such.

Of course logic went into the prediction and some of the points (it being his first home run) were almost “no-brainers” but you simply cannot dismiss the fact that the odds of the overall prediction (or even 6/7s of it) to come to fruition were still extremely low, as Rieux pointed out in his excellent comment above.

I’m also wondering why, in point 5 you say “A fastball has the best chance of fooling the batter” if the batter “knows what’s coming and he prepares to swing fast and hard at the ball”. Those two statements seem contradictory to me. The latter seems to be the more accurate of the two statements, but even if Tui does “know what’s coming”, that doesn’t mean he’s definitely going to hit it out. In fact, it’s just as if not more likely that he will pop it up, or ground out, or just get a base hit, or even swing and miss.

Paul, just because a player is “in a groove” in batting practice doesn’t mean a player is more likely to hit one out in the game. Batting practice pitches in-game pitches. Ichiro, for one, is known for hitting balls out of the park all the time in BP (which is why a lot of people say he should be in the HR derby) but hardly ever does it in game.

Peregrine, your analogy is a poor one, IMHO. A tech support guy or a doctor figuring out the cause of a problem by analyzing the symptoms does not compare to what Blowers did at all. In Blowers’ case, there were no symptoms. A more accurate analogy would be to say that at the beginning of the day, the tech support guy randomly predicted that that particular machine would crash today, around 1 pm and it would be due to the fan. You see the difference? One is a detailed prediction that something will happen, the other is just trying to figure out why something already did happen. If Blowers had simply said after the fact that Tui hit the homerun because he got a good swing on a fastball that the pitcher left up in the zone on a 3-1 count (which is the sort of thing that color commentators normally say), then your analogy would be spot on.

Not sure what exactly your issue is here. Do some math (dont you like teach it or something?), it’s a pretty intense prediction. Yeah, it’s probably based somewhat on the announcer’s experience with when it’s most likely for someone to hit a pitch, but all predictions are.

Simply predicting that a rookie will hit a home run in a game is what, a 1/8th shot at best? That’s if a rookie were to be projecting 20 home runs in a season, out of a 160 game season.

Then add to that 4 or so different at bats – even taking into account that SOME at bats are going to be more likely to produce a home run, it’s not as if the probabilities for the other at bats drop to zero.

Then take into account the exact pitch count – again, 3-1 may be a good count for a home run and a fast ball, but it’s hardly a sure thing that he’ll even reach that count. Keep in mind also that you only get ONE pitch on a 3-1 count (as opposed to x-2, where you can foul off as many balls as you want without affecting the count).

It’s like the previous poster said – take each of the predictions individually and they’re not that impressive (i.e. SOMEONE will hit a home run on a 3-1 count, SOMEONE will hit a home run at the second at bat). But all of them combined make for an extremely unlikely circumstance.

Yeah there’s obviously ton of wrong predictions all the time, but when an improbable one like this occurs, it should be treated as being pretty amazing/funny. Otherwise

I would agree with the above commenters. The distinction here is that this was a reasoned prediction and not just supernatural. It is clear from the video that announcers were having fun with it and no one was claiming that they were told by god or anything.

Wow, this is a terrible analysis. Do you understand probability? How can you say he “doesn’t get credit” for a prediction he got right? Like someone said, if he makes any of these predictions individually it wouldn’t be news at all, but put them all together, and it’s pretty impressive. And yes, sportscasters make predictions all the time, but they’re usually general predictions about the offense, defense, or whether or not a player will have a good game. Very rarely do they make extremely specific predictions like this. So the fact that the analyst happened on that occasion to make a very specific prediction as a joke should also be considered. I’ve read where Richard Dawkins argues that things we think are extremely improbable actually aren’t that unlikely. He made some good points, but if this was an attempt to be like Dawkins you completely whiffed. Even he would say it’s impressive.

It was a lot of fun to watch his completely random prediction nearly fulfilled. Much of that fun came from its being completely random. I think he threw out some thoughts consistent with the game he loves and he happened to be very close.

I’m entertained, but not impressed because I’ve done it myself in a variety of sports and other areas of interest. One year I correctly guessed ten of that year’s Oscar winners although I knew nothing about the nominees. Pure guess.

His closeness of his guess was pure luck, but it was fun to watch.

Watching the M’s tonight and Blowers and the guys are having a lot of fun with it. Blowers seems the most surprised by all the fuss. I look at it as just a fun thing in a year when we need a few fun things. He certainly isn’t taking it seriously and neither should we. Have a laugh, it won’t kill ya.

Terrible analysis. 1 for 7? Not getting credit for things you predicted and then that happened? Please.

Lamest post and analysis ever!