The Big Lead

Jared Carrabis is Almost Impossibly Bad at Rock Paper Scissors

By Liam McKeone

Jared Carrabis and Mike Yazstremski play rock paper scissors
Jared Carrabis and Mike Yazstremski play rock paper scissors /
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Jared Carrabis of Barstool Sports has been passing this time of quarantine by playing virtual rock-paper-scissors with various MLB personalities and players. The games are each a best-of-seven series. His guests have included J.D. Martinez, Christian Yelich, Josh Donaldson, and Wally the Green Monster, among others.

The stakes come in the form of bets. In Carrabis' inaugural matchup, he defeated Martinez, who now has to wear a "Stay Hot Rocket" shirt in his postgame press conference following his first home run whenever the season starts up. On the flip side, Carrabis lost to Yelich and now owes the former MVP an all-expenses-paid dinner and Yelich can order whatever he likes.

It all started off as good fun at first. Then Carrabis started to lose. And then he lost again. And again. And again. After he lost to Mike Yazstremski today, Carrabis is now up to 20 straight losses in rock-paper-scissors. Twenty!

As I'm sure you've picked up on by now, this means Carrabis has a laundry list of bets he has to make good on. They vary in severity, from having to name his first-born child either Brock or Holt (after losing to, you guessed it, Brock Holt) to Venmoing Joe Kelly $100 and giving him a $50 gift card to In-N-Out. Courtesy of Twitter user Adam Donovan, here's the full list of just what Carrabis has waiting for him after quarantine.

A legitimately impressive feat of losing, up there with the 2008 Lions and 2016 Cleveland Browns. It's almost impossible to lose this much. In fact, the likelihood of Carrabis losing 20 straight is less than one percent. With the caveat that I am not a mathematician, crunching the numbers, Carrabis had a .00009 percent chance of losing 20 consecutive rock-paper-scissors games (excluding ties and winner's bias).

Now, I'm not a big math guy, but that seems like a real small number to me. I don't know if Carrabis crossed the wrong witch or if he lost the four-leaf clover all Boston people have (as a fellow Bostonian, can confirm this is true), but this is an outrageous string of bad luck.

Will he snap his streak? The numbers say yes, but he's defied them so far.