The moment news broke about Gerrit Cole's 9 year / $324M deal with the Yankees, I began trying to put into perspective a number that's well over 324,000,000 times what I'll earn in a lifetime as a blogger. The experience was like attempting to fully appreciate the amount of time it would take Yadier Molina to run to the moon. Unfathomable.
Finding a useful point of reference was challenging, but I spent at least 5 minutes trying.
Consider the "Cole" a standard unit of measure equal to $324M. It's practically Avogadro's number with a dollar sign attached. The "Cole" is like amperes, coulombs, and kilometers - most of us don't really understand what they are, but we can nod our heads and fake it.
The Ballpark Village luxury housing expansion project cost $260M which is .8 Coles. That means that Gerrit Cole could pay for One Cardinal Way and still have enough money left to actually rent something there.
With .1 Coles you could buy roughly 15 million gallons of gas which is roughly what commuters on I-270 will consume between now and Spring Training.
An entire Cole is enough to give every legal permanent resident in the US one dollar.
The US national debt is 68,000 Coles.
1 Cole is 27,000 times what Mia Khalifa made as an "actress".
Combining the 2018 and 2019 Opening Day payrolls for the Cardinals yields almost exact 1 Cole.
1 Cole is enough to pay for @StlCardsCards to have a threeway every single day for the rest of his life and still pay for most of us to have therapy for picturing this in our heads.
If you take 324,000,000 dollar bills and lay them end-to-end, they would circle the earth at the equator with enough remaining to circle Jonathan Broxton as well.
With roughly .73 Coles, you could donate $1000 to charity for every stupid rumor supposedly linking the Cardinals to a player that makes absolutely no sense for the Cardinals to be linked to.
Finally and most importantly, if the Cardinals were given $324M to spend you could almost bet that they would increase payroll a minimum of $20M for next season.
-#dennis