Carlsbad High School softball pitcher Ashley Hernandez and Caveman baseball pitcher TJ Ruiz threw a perfect game and no-hitter, respectively, within 90 minutes of each other on April 18 a few hundred feet apart.
How rare was this? The last time this could have happened was when actual cavemen and cavegirls were walking the earth.
Simply put, the odds are astronomical for a no-hitter and perfect game being thrown on the same day by the same school. Here’s how rare it actually is.
The odds
Dr. Pradip Aryal, a mathematics professor at New Mexico State-Carlsbad, helped crunch the numbers on not just one happening but both happening on the same day.
Using Major League Baseball stats, the odds of a no-hitter are about 1 in 1,548 while the odds of a perfect game are about 1 in 18,192. The odds of one team accomplishing both goals at any point in history is about 1 in 28 million (1 in 28,161,216).
That’s rare, but not quite rare enough. What about both happening on the same day? According to the New Mexico Activities Association, there were 34 baseball games and 38 softball games played on April 18, 2019. Using those numbers, the odds of it happening on the same day are now 1 in 218 million.
That’s 218 million DAYS. Approximately 597,000 years. Back almost two-thirds of a million years ago homo erectus (our cavemen brethren) was still walking the earth and homo sapiens (us) was in the early phases of existence.
The performances
Hernandez pitched for Carlsbad in Game 2 of a softball doubleheader against Roswell High School. She needed 43 pitches in five innings (8.6 pitches per inning) to record the perfect game as they won 11-0 in a run-rule game.
More: Hernandez achieves perfection while Cavegirls sweep Roswell
The last Cavegirl softball pitcher to throw a perfect game was Shelby Owens in the 1980s, coach John Tiggert said.
