How Far Can Clayton Kershaw Walk on a Path of $215 Million?
Writing about baseball, especially writing about baseball in an attempt to be humorous/whimsical can be difficult when buried in the doldrums of the offseason. A large contract extension — not unlike the very large, quite-recent extension signed by Dodgers southpaw Clayton Kershaw — would seem like just the kind of news that would spark a modicum of creativity upon which hilarious and thoughtful Professional Writers like myself could build. I’m not so sure that is the case. And if it is, it hasn’t happened yet. What has happened, it seems, is that I’ve taken the sum of Kershaw’s deal — $215 million — and envisioned it as a physical thing. Specifically, as a very large pathway made of $1 bills.
If Clayton Kershaw saved all $215 million, and had that sum converted into $1 bills, that would equal 215 million bills. A dollar bill, according to Wikipedia, is .0043 inches thick. If one were to take 215 million crisp $1 bills and glue them back-to-back, the result would span just over 14.5 miles. That is the distance between Kershaw’s home ballpark of Dodger Stadium to Inglewood, CA via the 110 and Manchester Ave.
This is would be a silly thing to do. Not the gluing of all the currency — I speak of course of not taking Alvarado to Venice to La Brea to get to Inglewood. Everyone knows traffic on the 110 is a nightmare.
David G. Temple is the Managing Editor of TechGraphs and a contributor to FanGraphs, NotGraphs and The Hardball Times. He hosts the award-eligible podcast Stealing Home. Dayn Perry once called him a "Bible Made of Lasers." Follow him on Twitter @davidgtemple.
20,834.91 miles, if laid end-to-end.
Which would fall short of circling the Earth once.
I suggest using 21.5 billion pennies laid end-to-end for this.
Actually, you can circle the earth exactly once at 20,845 miles as long as you do it at 33.2 degrees latitude. LA sits at 34 degrees latitude, so he would be able to circle the earth and then make a short trip, possibly to Inglewood.
21.5 billion pennies laid end-to-end is just a couple hundred miles longer than the circumference of the earth, so nice estimating.
I get a shade over 250,000 miles for this. 21,500,000,000 x .75 inches / 12 (feet) / 5280 (miles).
Maybe I’m doing something wrong, but there is no way 100 pennies laid end to end is anywhere close to the length of a dollar.
Ha, you’re right, I used 0.075″ for a penny. The actually length is over 250,000 miles, which is greater than the distance to the moon.
Maybe 2.15 billion dimes?
Nice dimensional analysis work.
Okay, I’ll take this bait. I made a few adjustments, including assuming that he would have to pay cost for each penny ($0.0199 per penny), and that he’d want a one-foot wide path (16 pennies across). Using those numbers, he’d be about $618,000 (23 miles) short of being able to walk the 8,016 miles it would take to get to every other National League teams’ home park to tell them he’s sorry for what he’s going to do to them over the next seven years.
Awesome.
End-to-end does seem like a more reasonable option.
HOWEVER, I believe that in order to comfortably walk on the path, the path should be several dollar bills wide. I propose a path three bills wide as small, but walkable without discomfort or ankle spraining. Unless my math is very wrong, this is roughly 6,945 miles, or almost exactly twice the distance from Dodger Stadium to Anchorage, Alaska.
Or just burn $1776 of it,one at a time, in singles… for art.