July 14 would have been my father’s 90th birthday, so that day was special enough for me. But it was even more thrilling at Progressive Field, where Greg Van Niel caught four foul balls in the first five innings of the Cleveland – Kansas City baseball game. Van Niel had exchanged tickets to book seats in Section 160, and reportedly will try to get the same “magic seat” next year. As reported by ESPN, the likelihood of his accomplishment was one in a trillion. I work with numbers daily, but a trillion of anything is impossible to grasp. For example, a stack of a trillion $1 bills would reach nearly 700 miles tall.
Fortunately, most things in life are both more likely and more predictable. Meaning they occur more often with tighter certainty around a best estimate. In my world two of the most important variables are the risk of death and the risk of taxation. After all, it was Benjamin Franklin who rephrased Daniel Defoe in writing the popular “in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes”. If only Franklin had met Greg Van Niel.
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