Miguel Cabrera’s New Contract Stretches Halfway Around the World

Mar 11, 2014; Lakeland, FL, USA; Detroit Tigers first baseman

(24) smiles against the Toronto Blue Jays at Joker Marchant Stadium. Mandatory Credit: Kim Klement-USA TODAY Sports

If you’re like me, you have a hard time putting the contract extension between the Detroit Tigers and Miguel Cabrera into perspective. I know what $292 feels like, but $292 million? I need to turn that money into something I understand – pizza.

With Mike Ilitch making his fortune in the pizza business, big dollar deals involving his baseball club quickly draw quips and references to Little Caesars Hot-N-Ready pizzas. Now let’s do some math!

How many Hot-N-Ready pizzas does $292 million buy? At $5 apiece, ignoring sales and income tax, the value of Cabrera’s new contract equates to 54,800,000 pizzas. Fat chance that many pies are hot or ready.

With a standard pizza box being 15″ wide, those 54,800,000 pizzas would be 73,000,000 feet long when placed end-to-end. Divide that by 5,280 feet in a mile, and the pizza boxes stretch 13,826 miles.

The circumference of Earth’s equator is 24,901 miles and while Cabrera’s pizza boxes do fall short of circling the globe, they do make it more than halfway around – about 55.5% of the way, in fact.

That’s 181,818 Cabrera home runs based on his 2013 average home run distance of 401.5 feet.

Now stack those pizza boxes on top of each other and the tower would stretch 9,733,333 feet – 13,388 times taller than the Renaissance Center, the tallest building in Detroit.

Even in pizza boxes, the numbers are big.