The Magic 8 ball is a popular toy that is known for giving answers to yes or no questions. It has a black ball with a window displaying one of the following responses: "Yes," "No," "Ask again later," "Cannot predict now," and others. While many people enjoy using the Magic 8 ball for entertainment purposes, it is important to remember that its responses are not based on any real logic or probability. The Magic 8 ball operates through a simple mechanism. Inside the ball, there is a 20-sided die with answers printed on each face. When the ball is turned upside down and then upright again, the die floats to the window, revealing the answer.
When the ball is turned upside down and then upright again, the die floats to the window, revealing the answer. While the Magic 8 ball can be amusing to use, its responses do not have any meaningful basis in reality. The chances of the answer being correct are the same as rolling a specific number on a 20-sided die, which is 1 in 20 or 5%.
The Rangers Magic Number: Texas-Houston, Game 4
Editor’s note: What’s old is new again. Mom jeans are fashionable. Same goes for loafers. You are, at most, three degrees of separation from someone with a variation of a mullet. And the Rangers are back playing October baseball.
So, back for the first time in seven years is Jamey’s Magic Number format. The premise is simple: for however many wins the Rangers have left to capture the World Series, Jamey will write that many items in this column. After dropping Games 3 and 4 of the ALCS to the Astros, that number remains at 6. If they turn things around and win Game 5 on Friday, it will be 5. And if the Rangers go all the way? Well, that’s the only time you should be excited about a Jamey Newberg column with zero to say (even though you’ll forgive him when he inevitably finds a thing or five to remark upon the World Series trophy finally coming to Arlington).
Let’s have some fun.
Illustration by Devin Pike
Here we go: 6 things. Once again.
6. A best-of-three.
That’s what the ALCS is down to, and we can look at it one of two ways. On one hand, it’s the latest demonstration of the extreme, unrelenting, mind-boggling, sometimes excruciating ups and downs and swerves the 2023 Rangers have dog-sledded us through. On the other hand, not even the most upbeat fan or optimistic exec could have imagined sitting two wins from a World Series berth this year, with all the ground the organization had to make up from the last handful of years. This type of turnaround was not supposed to happen in one year.
I just reread what I wrote above, and it looks like something I might have said if the curtain had closed on the Rangers once and for all. It obviously hasn’t. The only predictable aspect of this team’s fortunes this year has been its capacity to go on improbable win streaks and unthinkable losing skids. Winning Games 1 and 2 in Houston gave the Rangers the chance to overcome the debacle of the last two nights.
Game 5 this afternoon will be Houston’s final visit to Globe Life Field until April 5. No matter what. Good luck predicting what happens.
5. The Astros’ hitters are really, really good. Read any gamer about Houston 10, Texas 3, and you will see stacks of quotes from Rangers pitchers and manager Bruce Bochy about mistake pitches that were made in the game. There’s a second part to the equation—all pitchers make mistakes—and that’s that the hitter takes productive advantage when handed one of those.
The mistakes the Rangers made in Game 4 were twofold. They threw only 59 percent of their pitches for strikes, a dangerously low rate that led to seven walks (and one hit-by-pitch). But worse, the deliveries that found the plate routinely caught too much of it; of the 104 strikes—not pitches, but strikes—the Rangers’ six pitchers threw, the Astros swung and missed only 15 times and fouled off another 31. It was as if they knew what was coming.
Houston is now 8-1 in nine games in Arlington this year, with a composite score of 81-40. In the last five of those contests—the brutal September sweep and Games 3 and 4 of this series—the tally is 57-18. That scales down to about an 11-4 average, which Thursday night’s 10-3 final roughly mirrors. Excruciatingly, Game 4 was basically how the last five Rangers-Astros games in Arlington have gone.
The series is tied but the Rangers’ two wins in Houston were, as Astros manager Dusty Baker fairly put it after Game 3, each one swing away from turning out differently. Not the case with the two at Globe Life Field. The Astros are feeling it.
4. One key difference for Texas between Games 1 and 2 and Games 3 and 4 was the pitching outlook going in. Bochy and pitching coach Mike Maddux have contingency plans every night for every possible scenario. But when Jordan Montgomery or Nathan Eovaldi is on the mound, there’s a different level of likelihood in terms of how the game will need to be structured once it’s time to involve the bullpen. Much different case when it’s Max Scherzer on five weeks’ rest (Game 3), or the Andrew Heaney/Dane Dunning tag-team plan (Game 4).
Anticipating how to piece together nine innings behind Heaney and Dunning—which was called for in Game 1 of the ALDS against the Orioles as well—takes more creativity given that there’s more variance in expected outcomes than when Montgomery or Eovaldi gets the ball. But Heaney and Dunning were unable to execute the way they did in Baltimore, and it put the team in an immediate bind.
Ten pitches into the game, the score was 3-0. That’s what the Rangers did to Framber Valdez in Game 2, when the first four hitters scored. After the Rangers needed five innings from the playing-from-behind unit of the bullpen on Wednesday, Heaney’s exit two-thirds into the first inning on Thursday meant Bochy and Maddux were forced to activate the worst-case contingency before the Rangers even had their first at-bat.
The Rangers tied things up, 3-3, in the bottom of the third inning, briefly positioning things so that Bochy and Maddux could envision engaging the winning pieces of the bullpen—Josh Sborz, Aroldis Chapman, and Jose Leclerc—once the game got into its final third. But Houston promptly squashed the thought, putting up a four-spot in the top of the fourth.
Jared Sandler made a key point on the radio postgame show. He suggested that in a perfect world—or just a better one; no team is constructed perfectly—Bochy might have opted to go to Sborz in the fourth. Dunning started off the Astros’ one theoretically offensive weak link, catcher Martin Maldonado, with two strikes but then threw four consecutive balls to the nine-hole hitter. Dunning then walked Jose Altuve as well (nearly hitting him along the way) and yielded a Mauricio Dubon single.
With the bases loaded, nobody out, the game tied, and Alex Bregman (right), Yordan Alvarez (left), and Jose Abreu (right) due, the concept of bringing in a right-handed reliever with swing-and-miss stuff was enticing, but the Rangers simply don’t have the bullpen depth that the Astros (and most other teams) have. The idea of expending Sborz in the fourth might have been tempting—and even if well out of the box with the way this bullpen is constructed, I’m not sure it would have been a terrible choice in what appeared to be a potentially decisive moment. But ultimately, with the pen so short on high-leverage weapons, Bochy opted to turn to others.
First, he left Dunning in to get Bregman, and he did, striking him out on a well-executed changeup below the zone. The fearless Cody Bradford was summoned to face Alvarez, Abreu, and lefty-hitting Kyle Tucker, and that started out well enough. Getting Alvarez to hit a ball 110 mph and 401 feet with the bases loaded ended up in a sacrifice fly, but Bradford got too much of the plate with a 2-2 fastball to Abreu, and it resulted in a back-breaking three-run homer.
(For what it’s worth, Bradford’s fourth pitch to Abreu, a changeup down and away, was probably a ball, but it was also one that plenty of umpires would have rung up Abreu on. Umpiring certainly wasn’t anywhere near the reason Texas lost Game 4. But if Doug Eddings had called that one pitch a strike, the inning ends with Houston up 4-3 rather than 7-3. Obviously a much different game at that point.)
It was the second time Bradford had thrown on back-to-back days—probably ever, given that he was exclusively a starter in the minor leagues. The other came on September 2 and 3, when he pitched scoreless innings on consecutive nights against the Twins. It’s too bad that having to put a young pitcher in such an unfamiliar situation in one of the season’s pivotal moments was believed to be the best option, but this team’s bullpen depth and effectiveness is what it is.
Chris Stratton was very good in his own back-to-back assignment, while Will Smith’s inning and a third went about how the second half of his season has gone. Just like with Jon Gray in Game 3, I’m not smart enough to understand why, if Martin Perez was deemed to be a piece worth using in the eighth and ninth, he couldn’t have been the option with two outs in the sixth or a clean inning in the seventh rather than Smith, when the score was closer and the Rangers offense had more outs to play with.
In any event, Sborz, Chapman, and Leclerc should be fresh and ready to go today. With an off-day Saturday plus the series moving to at least one elimination game and maybe two in Houston after that, I would guess all those three pitchers could be involved in Game 5 unless things get completely out of hand.
3. The game of inches caught the Rangers in the bottom of the fifth. Battling out of a ditch as they have shown an ability to do all year, they started the inning with Leody Taveras and Marcus Semien singles. That brought up Corey Seager, who had homered in his previous at-bat, with no outs and the tying run on deck.
Seager had hit his third-inning home run to left center at 103 mph. The ball he hit off Hunter Brown in the fifth left his bat at 108.6 mph. And it was right at Abreu, who snared it and, according to replay officials, tagged the flopping finger of a batting glove that was hanging out of Semien’s back-right pocket. Not unlike the Bregman shot that Evan Carter caught in Game 2 —also after a challenged call—Seager’s lineout produced two outs rather than two runs.
But it’s a very good thing, obviously, that Seager’s bat—he also singled at 104 mph in the eighth—seemed to wake up in a big way.
2. The Rangers badly need Semien’s bat to heat up as well. It’s really cool that Carter, Taveras, and Josh Jung have contributed at the levels they have in the postseason. As young as they are, they appear unfazed by the moment and have each come up extremely big, both at the plate and in the field. But aside from those three and Seager, the rest of the lineup is sputtering.
No one is more important than Semien. He’s an MVP-level player whose ability to hit, hit with power, and run the bases makes this offense go. But he’s hitting .179 in the playoffs with no home runs and an OPS of .469, both the lowest among the team’s starting nine. To say it’s an inopportune time for his deepest skid of the season would be wildly understating its impact.
There’s no reason to rule out Semien snapping out of it at any moment. Texas needs him to.
1. With a day game following a night game, I’m short on time and energy for this one, and I debated on a few things to hit on for the sixth entry. I’m going to stay on the energy subject.
We talked on Thursday about how many quiet games the Rangers have played in this month. The road team has won eight of their nine playoff games, the lone exception being Game 3 of the ALDS at Globe Life Field. Houston took the Texas crowd out of it the last two nights, and it took Rangers rallies to get the energy back up to the levels of the clincher against the Orioles. Nothing else would get that done, nor should it be expected to.
But there were half a dozen inning breaks when the ballpark sound system played something like Taylor Swift—I was told some of it was her, some was not, but it all sounded roughly the same to me—and I just can’t imagine bouncy, sing-along pop music like that being played at Phillies home games. Or Astros home games. In the playoffs. I could be 100 percent wrong; maybe it’s a thing everywhere. I don’t know.
It just feels to me like the fans could use something more energetic to feed off of—and, in certain game situations, maybe sustain or resuscitate—the frenzied feel that fits a playoff atmosphere. I don’t know if the players care. Maybe they don’t.
I said it a few days ago—the corny, bizarre “Party Time” montage video that played in the late innings was really weird… and amazingly awesome. It got the crowd going.
There was also a curious moment in the second inning, which began this way with the Astros up, 3-0: An Adolis Garcia homer got Texas on the board. Mitch Garver then walked. Jonah Heim flew out. Nathaniel Lowe doubled to left, sending Garver to third, and Jung—who had homered twice in Game 3—stepped up with one out and a chance to tie the game with a base hit. It was as loud as the ballpark had been all night.
A called strike, followed by two breaking balls low and away, typically Jung kryptonite but beautifully let go to put him ahead in the count. Decibels up.
Foul ball, 2-2 count. Then Jung spit on yet another sweeper low and away, and the count was full. Forty-thousand-plus on tilt.
At that moment, they showed Dirk Nowitzki on the video board.
That would have been amazingly cool to show sometime between innings—as they did later with Luka Doncic—but during an at-bat, an exceptionally critical at-bat, with the stadium frenzy already at full-bore, it just seemed to be an unusual distraction.
It had no effect on the game, of course. Jung lifted the next pitch deep enough to left to score Garver easily and bring the Rangers to within a run.
I also want to say this. The game presentation is so much better now than it was a few years ago. There’s less drowsy country music played and more up-tempo sound. The improvement is easy to see and hear. But just like with the roster of a team you care about, there’s no harm in wishing it were even better. Also, given that this is a fan-experience thing, I fully recognize it’s just one fan’s experience. You may soundly disagree with me. Maybe my view on it misses the mark of what the majority of this fan base wants.
And here’s the most important point of this sixth and final observation: it’s the remarks of someone who knows nothing about the psychology of fan engagement and who is almost surely overstating the relevance of it under these circumstances. Further, it’s coming from the flopping fingers of a momentarily grumpy sports fan typing about a game and a series; had Texas come back and won Game 4, I’d probably be asking you what those Taylor Swift songs were so I could find them on Spotify. But the Rangers lost, and I’m cranky as a result. Still, I assure you that I love that feeling a lot more than having no baseball season left. We have more baseball season left.
Bring on Montgomery vs. Verlander and this best-of-three, a position that 26 fan bases wish they were in. It may be the Astros’ last game this year at Globe Life Field, but there’s no reason it has to be the Rangers’.
So, back for the first time in seven years is Jamey’s Magic Number format. The premise is simple: for however many wins the Rangers have left to capture the World Series, Jamey will write that many items in this column. After dropping Games 3 and 4 of the ALCS to the Astros, that number remains at 6. If they turn things around and win Game 5 on Friday, it will be 5. And if the Rangers go all the way? Well, that’s the only time you should be excited about a Jamey Newberg column with zero to say (even though you’ll forgive him when he inevitably finds a thing or five to remark upon the World Series trophy finally coming to Arlington).
Despite its lack of reliability, the Magic 8 ball can be a fun way to pass the time or spark conversation. People often enjoy pondering the unlikely scenarios or far-fetched predictions that the Magic 8 ball provides. It can serve as a reminder that life is unpredictable and that it is okay to embrace the unknown. In conclusion, the Magic 8 ball is an entertaining toy that provides responses to yes or no questions. However, its answers are not based on any real logic or probability. While its responses may be unlikely to occur in reality, it can still be enjoyed as a source of amusement..
Reviews for "Probability and possibility: Examining the Magic 8 Ball's predictions"
- John - 2 stars - I found "Unlikelihood according to the magic 8 ball" to be lacking in substance and originality. The story felt predictable and the characters were one-dimensional. Additionally, the writing style was bland and failed to engage me as a reader. Overall, I was disappointed with this book and wouldn't recommend it.
- Sarah - 1 star - I couldn't finish "Unlikelihood according to the magic 8 ball" as it failed to capture my interest from the start. The plot seemed scattered and the writing was dull. The characters lacked depth and I couldn't connect with any of them. It pains me to say this, but this book was simply not enjoyable for me.
- Robert - 2 stars - "Unlikelihood according to the magic 8 ball" had potential, but it fell short in many aspects. The story idea was intriguing, but the execution was lacking. The pacing was inconsistent, making it difficult to stay engaged. The dialogue felt forced and unnatural, making the characters feel unrealistic. Unfortunately, this book didn't live up to my expectations.