Rhys Hoskins provided all of the offensive firepower in Monday night's contest between the Phillies and Cardinals, clubbing two solo home runs late in the game to provide Philadelphia with all of the scoring they'd need to support Zach Wheeler's gem. But it was Bryce Harper who provided the bulk of the pregame entertainment, particularly seen in one unbelievable occurrence from batting practice.
If that's not a one-in-a-million moment... well, wait. It actually probably isn't. If you don't like math, feel free to skip this part while I nerd out for a second.
In 2014, Jim Caple (then of ESPN) wrote a story about our national pastime's pregame tradition, giving us a couple of intriguing numbers. The first was 25-30: the amount of swings that each player will take before a game in BP. The second was 35,000: the estimated number of batting practice balls used in a season by the Seattle Mariners. We'll go with the second number for the purposes of this exercise. Half of the Mariners' games are played at home, where the organization would need to supply them baseballs, so we can double 35,000 to cover all the team's games in a season. That's 70,000 baseballs for just one team, meaning that perhaps 2.1 million baseballs is a solid ballpark estimate (pun intended) of just how many BP swings are taken in a season by all 30 clubs.
Have you seen a player hit a baseball in batting practice that collided with another baseball... like, ever? Even if it's just the past 10 seasons, using our figure of 2.1 million, what Harper did on Monday could be more like a one-in-twenty-million event. Anyway...
There isn't much that Harper can't do on a baseball field, and even if it was complete and pure luck in this case, we wouldn't put too many other things past him. Though it was Hoskins who charged the offense on Monday and has been a top bat on the team to this point in the season, Harper and his 1.074 OPS (fourth in the NL) have been even better all around.
Interestingly enough, it turns out that what Harper did in BP isn't a one-sport feat. Would you be even more impressed if someone could do it with, say, two golf balls?
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