Lightning Couldn't Strike Twice

from a playoff preview on mlb.com

The weather powers-that-be have already swung and missed in a big way this postseason at Yankee Stadium, forecasting unplayable conditions for a game that eventually went 13 innings. If lightning could not strike twice for tonight's Game 6 of the American League Championship Series in the Bronx, both the Yankees and the Angels would be very pleased.

The cliché has it that unfortunate bolts of electricity are more or less random and their victims are evenly scattered. So when your friend's car is stolen, you can tell him that his house certainly won't be burglarized, because "lightning doesn't strike in the same place twice." Of course you would assume then that criminals were not targeting him.

But this report from NASA finds that lightning often does strike the same place twice, sometimes even at the same time. So as a metaphorical bromide to soothe an aggrieved person and as a weather-prediction theory, this stock phrase falls short.

Bryan Hoch twists the idiom into a prognostication. If lightning didn't strike the first time, then for Hoch it could "not strike twice." Of course, lightning doesn't strike in an almost infinite number of places, all the time, so instead of a fortuitous chain of events, this would just be a lack of rain, and some overcautious baseball umpires ("powers that be").