'Play ball!' Space station astronauts celebrate World Series with an orbital pitch

Astronauts threw a pitch in space to celebrate the start of this year's World Series.

"We're super excited to watch the World Series come back to Space City," Expedition 68 NASA astronaut Josh Cassada says in the Oct. 29 video posted by Major League Baseball's Twitter account, which briefly highlights the space station's role in preparing for future moon and Mars missions.

Numerous crews have engaged in ball sports in orbit, ranging from soccer to golf. Astronauts even pulled a Halloween trick in 2018, pretending they were billiard balls in orbit to engage students in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math).

.@NASA's Expedition 68 crew is ready for Game 1! #WorldSeries pic.twitter.com/Nx3O8wRJlIOctober 28, 2022

The four spaceflyers — NASA astronauts Josh Cassada, Nicole Mann and Frank Rubio and Japan's Koichi Wakata — talked science in the video before stepping aside for a ceremonial pitch. (The three other Expedition 68 crewmates — cosmonauts Anna Kikina, Dmitry Petelin and Sergey Prokopyev — do not appear in the video.)

"We wanted to take a moment to wish both teams good luck in the games ahead," Mann says in the video, moments before Rubio tosses a baseball softly to Wakata.

Wakata's catch, just in front of the camera, is flawless — likely no surprise given that the Japanese astronaut had 347 days of space experience across five missions even before joining SpaceX's Crew-5 mission, his latest excursion.

The Phillies will have home field advantage in Games 3, 4 and 5 of the 118th edition of the World Series. If necessary, the series will go back to Houston (which had a better regular-season record than Philadelphia) for Games 6 and 7.

Elizabeth Howell is the co-author of "Why Am I Taller?" (ECW Press, 2022; with Canadian astronaut Dave Williams), a book about space medicine. Follow her on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.

Elizabeth Howell (she/her), Ph.D., was a staff writer in the spaceflight channel between 2022 and 2024 specializing in Canadian space news. She was contributing writer for Space.com for 10 years from 2012 to 2024. Elizabeth's reporting includes multiple exclusives with the White House, leading world coverage about a lost-and-found space tomato on the International Space Station, witnessing five human spaceflight launches on two continents, flying parabolic, working inside a spacesuit, and participating in a simulated Mars mission. Her latest book, "Why Am I Taller?" (ECW Press, 2022) is co-written with astronaut Dave Williams.