No, you can't homer off Paul Skenes. But who should take this bet?

08 May, 2026

There's a genre of clickbait social media posts all about comparisons of elite professional athletes and YMCA recreational players. A lot of the time, the underlying questions is about the gap between the worst top-level professionals and typical recreational players. Here's an example:

1. There are people who think the gap between the NBA benchwarmers and the hotshots down at the Y isn't that big, and I'm here to tell you those people are fucking insane. The worst players in the NBA dominated college basketball or foreign professional leagues, and are among the 500 best players in the world at what they do. They would absolutely shred any recreational contest. 50 in a rec league game? There are plenty of guys in the Patriot League who could do this no sweat.

2. This isn't even a hypothetical. Famous NBA benchwarmer Brian Scalabrine took on non-pros at 1-on-1 in an arranged challenge---including guys who had played college basketball---and wiped the floor with them. Combined score 44-6. As Scalabrine has said, "I'm closer to Lebron than you are to me." That probably understates things. Scalabrine is 6'9", 235, and quick. He's is likely 100 times closer to Lebron than you are to him. Just because he looks like a goofball on an NBA court doesn't mean he isn't superhuman.

3. You can't really feel how different professional athletes in the team sports are until you see it up close.¹ The guy who owned the hockey store in my town growing up lived on my street. He always froze his backyard in the winter, so I played a fair amount of fool-around pickup hockey with him when I was a teenager. He had been a college star at Clarkson and played in the minors, but he never touched NHL ice. In pro hockey, he was literally a nobody. And he was impossibly good. Like how-could-anyone-be-better-at-this-game-than-this-guy good. You could not get the puck from him. He could not miss the corners of the net. And I was playing with him when he was in his late 30s and early 40's. When he was an old nobody.

4. There's a second genre of the social media clickbait posts that's far more interesting. It involves getting laid odds to hang with pros. Here's an example:

5. You are getting 20-1 to score five points in an NBA game. Again, people will argue about this particular one, but they are all insane. Not only are you not scoring 5 points in an NBA game anywhere near 5% of the time, you are probably not getting two shots off in an NBA game on the offensive side of the court 5% of the time, and there's a good chance you are basically never getting open enough to get the ball if the defenders are denying you.²

6. But some of the social posts offer better odds than 20-1. This Paul Skenes-based question is interesting:

7. Let's be clear: no average Joe is hitting a homer off Paul Skenes in 100 pitches. Major League hitters aren't homering off him at that rate; he's giving up a homer every 237 pitches. To the best players in the world.

8. And don't be fooled by the nature of hitting a homer. People think you can get lucky at the plate, just close your eyes and connect. That's technically true I suppose---in a way that you can't close your eyes and run a 9.9 100 meter dash---but it's still almost pure nonsense against MLB pitching. Just get in a batting cage with a pitching machine throwing 80. This isn't slow-pitch softball.

9. Still, you are getting 2000-1 on your money. There's a big difference between truly drawing dead and just being a massive longshot. You don't have to connect on the homer very often for this to be a +EV wager. And people's brains begin to break the other direction when we talk about numbers this small. It's very hard for people to tell the difference between 500-1, 2000-1, and 10,000-1.

10. I'm confident I'm not +EV at 2000-1 to homer off Skenes in 100 pitches. There's just no way I have the bat speed or timing. I think I'm actually drawing dead, and no length on the odds can save me. But there's a non-MLB level of baseball player who should take these odds, I think. Most of the players in the minors must be strongly +EV at that number. A good D1 hitter? I think I'd still take them. What about a high school star hitter? Now I'm not sure.

11. One thing this highlights is the nature of athletic skill. No rando is every challenging Usain Bolt to a race, at any odds. On the other end of the spectrum are the consistency sports, like golf, where you'd be crazy to not take a 2000-1 shot to go closer to the pin against any PGA pro on one shot from 150 yards, so long as you have any golfing ability whatsoever. Make it one shot to outdrive a PGA pro, and it's back to much more black/white for the average person. Hitting a homer off a MLB pitcher is obviously closer to racing Bolt, but not so much that some non-pros aren't +EV at long odds.

#EV #sports