Odds for this much cake? Not so good.
By Anthony DiComo
Early Friday morning, members of the Mets’ culinary staff emerged from the clubhouse kitchen carrying three separate birthday cakes: one each for Michael Cuddyer (age 36), Johnny Monell (29) and Matt Harvey (26). The team also acknowledged Brandon Nimmo, in Minor League camp, who turned 22.
All four began this spring in a group of 57 players invited to big league camp, which begged the question of how ridiculous the odds of this happening must be. Though it takes just 23 people in a group for there to be at least a 50-percent chance of a shared birthday, four separate people sharing a birthday in a group of 57 seemed outlandish.
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Not for Twitter follower @AdamMets, who used something called a Poisson Approximation to determine that the odds of this happening are roughly 0.81%:
So now you know, math whizzes. One of the cakes was Oreo-flavored, by the way, which in so many ways seems so much more interesting.
