Over the years, The Simpsons has seemingly predicted the future many times, but the best (and most bizarrely specific) of the show’s predictions celebrates its 30th anniversary this year. It is almost inevitable that a sitcom filled with topical humor would appear to predict future events now and then. However, the long-running animated comedy The Simpsons has an extraordinary track record for staging stories before their events occur in reality.
Over the decades, The Simpsons predicted Donald Trump’s presidency, the winner of Super Bowl XXVI, Siegfried and Roy’s animal attack, and FIFA becoming mired in a corruption controversy. However, mocking one celebrity guest star led The Simpsons to make an even more eerily accurate prediction years earlier. While some of the show's "predictions" can be chalked up to coincidence or written off as chance, this one is arguably the show’s most weirdly specific guess.
In “Homer at the Bat” (season 3, episode 16), Homer and his teammates on the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant’s softball team prove unexpectedly successful thanks to Homer’s lucky bat. However, this success leads the greedy Mr. Burns to hastily hire a string of MLB superstars and give them cushy power plant jobs to ensure the team’s victory against Shelbyville. What follows is an absurd misadventure wherein the players are struck off the team’s roster one-by-one thanks to increasingly silly circumstances until eventually, the original team is reinstated. Veteran Simpsons scribe John Swartzwelder’s script finds a myriad of goofy reasons for the players to be sidelined, from Wade Boggs being knocked out by Barney in a bar fight to Ed Griffey Jr drinking too much nerve tonic. However, the bizarre prediction occurred when the episode had Don Mattingly benched by Mr. Burns thanks to his hair a year before this exact event occurred in reality.
In the episode, The Simpsons mocked the idea of MLB superstar Mattingly being benched by Burns over a matter as petty as his sideburns. Burns repeatedly redefines what constitutes “sideburns” to an increasingly distraught Mattingly, only for the player to end up benched despite shaving most of his head in an attempt to appease the team owner. However, one year after this Golden Age Simpsons episode aired, Mattingly would be benched by Yankees manager Stump Merrill for refusing to cut his hair on the day of the game. The incident was so creepily specific that, even after 30 years years of further episodes, this still stands out as the real poster child for the theory that The Simpsons is secretly predicting the future.
Mattingly did end up cutting his hair only a day after being benched for the August 15th game, donating the offending locks to charity and earning the organization of his choice a cool $3,000 in the process. This evidently earned him some karmic favor, too, since Mattingly then went on to score an impressive seven-game hitting streak after the incident as recounted by Dodgers fansite TrueBlueLA years later. While The Simpsons guest star had a happy ending to his surreal story, the show continued to seemingly predict the future for the decades that followed. However, even guessing the identity of a US president couldn’t beat what remains The Simpsons’ strangest prediction ever.