The Cubs’ 2009 payroll is $135,050,000. Has it been worth it as of this point in the season? Will we say it was worth it at the end of the season? I’ll leave that for you to decide. Here, I’m going to employ the old “placed end-to-end” cliche. I did the math, and this is what I got:

$135,050,000 equals 13,505,000,000 pennies. You could place a trail of pennies on the ground, end-to-end. If permitted to build your trail in a straight line, you could build it all the way to Los Angeles.

In these sorts of illustrations, “all the way to Los Angeles” is kind of a cliche, so let’s keep running with it. After building your trail of pennies to Los Angeles, you could build it to Bahía de los Ángeles, Mexico. Then you could double back up the Baha peninsula, go south, and build your trail of pennies down to Los Ángeles, Nicaragua. Then you could keep the trail going to Los Ángeles, Chile.

And then you could completely cover the surface areas of 20 aircraft carriers in pennies, supposing they would still float. (A Nimitz aircraft carrier has a surface area, both above the water and below, of about 53,000 square meters. You can fit 2,066 pennies into a single square meters. So that’s about 109,000,000 pennies to cover an aircraft carrier. Did you think I was making this s*** up?)

Wait, I’m not finished. You could then command your armada of penny-clad aircraft carriers around the tip of South America and all the way to the coast of Spain. Every mile you travel, you throw 465 pounds’ worth of pennies into the ocean. Then you disembark and build another line of pennies to Cerro de los Ángeles, Spain. Then you build another line of pennies to the northern coast of Spain, borrow 80 more aircraft carriers, cover them in pennies, and sail to Edinburgh, Scotland. That’s the home of Rockstar Studios North (the guys who made Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, which is, of course, set in a fictionalized Los Angeles). Where are you going? I’m still not done.

Once you’re in Edinburgh, you start building a horizontal stack of pennies. You keep building and building until you reach the far reaches of Earth’s atmosphere (about 62 miles), at which point the pennies just start floating into space.

And after all that, you still have over $2 million left over. Knock yourself out.

Or, instead of all this business, you could buy the Chicago Cubs’ roster for the 2009 season. They’re 48-45! Three games over .500! Yeah, that’s way more awesome. Forget the pennies.