Bartolo Colon Is Far More Likely To Hit An Inside-The-Park Homer Than You Are To Win The Powerball
(CBS) One of the more entertaining pastimes every fifth day over the course of spring and summer is watching hefty Mets right-hander Bartolo Colon take his cuts at the plate.
In his illustrious 18-year career, Colon has hit exactly zero home runs in 237 plate appearances. Naturally, that means he's hit exactly zero inside-the-park home runs. Given Colon's foot speed (non-existent), age (42) and career batting average (.093), it's not widely expected that he'll ever hit an inside-the-park homer, either.
Which is why this makes for awesome perspective: Colon is still 30 times more likely to hit an inside-the-park homer than a single ticket is to win you the $1.5 billion Powerball jackpot that will be drawn Wednesday night that has people in a frenzy.
That nugget comes courtesy of MLB.com, which did some number-crunching with the 1-in-292,000,000 chance to win the Powerball in mind:
1 in 160 home runs are inside-the-parkers. Based on his speed score, we can expect that one of every 2,350 Bartolo Colon home runs to be of the inside-the-park variety. Just one per 4,000 plate appearances seems to be the limit for how, uh … unlucky a player can be at hitting home runs. That gives Bartolo a give-or-take 1-in-9.6 million shot to hit an inside-the-parker at any random PA. But, if we consider his actual number of career PAs, there's approximately a 1-in-39,662 chance that he'll bring us more joy than $1.5 billion ever could by getting that inside-the-park home run.