An announcer for the Chicago White Sox says that he can see into the future and his broadcast partner has actually backed up the bold claim after watching him perform the feat on numerous occasions. The former Cy Young winner and current TV analyst for the team, Steve Stone, revealed his unique gift to the Chicago Sun-Times in an enlightening profile piece over the weekend. Not afraid to mince words, he genuinely declared to the newspaper that "I've been psychic my whole life ... I know it sounds strange, but I really know what’s going to happen."
Stone explained that he frequently gets very specific premonitions of what will happen during a game as it unfolds, but holds back on sharing the insights with viewers since they are often unfavorable to the home team. That said, this ability was allegedly on display during the first game he ever broadcast for the White Sox, where he correctly indicated which player would be the one to put an end to the particularly arduous extra-inning affair. When his then-partner in the booth asked him if that was a prediction, Stone simply replied, "no, that's what's going to happen." And, incredibly, it did.
While some might suspect that Stone's assertion that he is psychic is merely hyperbole and that his ability to 'see the future' is based on years of knowledge gleaned from watching the game, his current broadcast partner Jason Benetti suggested that there appears to be some ring of truth to the claim. According to him, the self-proclaimed clairvoyant will often write down his visions on a scrap of paper during the game and then, "after the play, he will flip it over and it will be what happened."
An admitted skeptic about psychic abilities, Benetti conceded that he has a difficult time not believing that Stone has some kind of gift based on the sheer number of times he's seen it displayed. "It's not a couple of times in three seasons-plus," he noted, "it's a couple dozen times." Amazingly, Benetti also says that Stone has yet to be wrong when performing the proverbial 'paper trick' and that the close proximity between the two in the broadcast booth would make it impossible for his partner to hide an incorrect prediction. "He's got a lot of occult in him. I'm weirded out by it," Benetti said, "but I also kind of adore it."
As to where this psychic gift may have come from, Stone theorized that it is something of an evolutionary remnant from when Neanderthals roamed the Earth. In this time before language existed, he mused, humans were forced to rely on their "inner voice" to discern if something or someone was dangerous or not. Noting that his life has been filled with such "unusual" experiences, Stone said that he considered writing a book about "the extrasensory stuff," but ultimately shelved the project because "there would be some people who would doubt my rationality or my sanity." Having now revealed his gift to the world, one hopes that Stone will revisit the idea or, at the very least, be more open to sharing his visions in the future.
