Who Would Steal the Most Bases in Outer Space?
It’s the year 2040.
Our national pastime is no longer governed by the rules of Earth. Advancements in aerospace technology have taken the game thousands of miles above, where are air is quiet and the dust is heavy.
This is baseball in the unknown. This is baseball in space.
In an outdoor stadium on our moon, fans cheer as a runner takes a walk — a jump, rather — to first base. He’s then replaced by a tall, slim runner with ginger hair. After watching a few pitches, he takes off, successfully steals second base, gets to his feet. The runner turns his back towards the camera, revealing a familiar name: May. Wait, that Dustin May?
Sure, in 2040, Dustin May will be 43 years old. Sure, his arm is worn, but he’s one heck of a pinch-runner. How is that possible? I’ll explain later, but first, credit where credit’s due: This idea came from ex-FanGraphs writer Carson Cistulli, who once mused about home run kings in space. Let’s expand on it and ask, what about base stealing? The change in gravity would also impact this crucial aspect of the game.
How do you steal a base in space in the first place? If you run like you do on Earth, you’d end up flailing around. To move around efficiently and quickly in space, you need a literal ‘jump’ — launching yourself from a surface and landing somewhere else: a human missile.
Think of short-distance runners, who begin their mad dash from a starting block. And in a baseball game in space, the starting block is first base. Instead of staying on the ground, however, a player would use first base to launch himself upward and gain enough forward momentum to land on second. There’s some optimization possible here — a lower ‘launch angle’ would minimize the distance required — but we’ll save that talk for decades later.
Since players are jumping, not dashing, the necessary skills are also different. Being fast on Earth might help in space, but does that matter when we’re maximizing distance? Muscular strength isn’t a huge factor either because less effort is required to defy gravity. In theory, tall and light players, regardless of muscle mass or sprint speed, would excel in taking advantage of this celestial environment. That’s how at 180 pounds and 78 inches, Dustin May the pitcher is space ball’s top thief.
Who else is up to the task? According to a blog post on We Are Fanatics, the average weight of an MLB player is roughly 207 pounds, and the average height is 74 inches (6-foot-2). I used Sean Lahman’s database to filter out players with below-average weight, above-average height, and a birth date after 1978, which returned a sample size of 345; removing inactive players reduced it to 167.
Next, I calculated the z-scores of each player’s weight and height. The players listed below — those with serious potential — had some of the lowest z-weight and the highest z-height scores:
Dustin May and Chris Sale are the elite of the elite, both lighter and taller than a majority of players. Lucas and Blevins also seem promising. Wingenter, Castro, and Miller did have positive z-weight scores (a bad thing), but I included them due to their absurd heights.
These findings aren’t that exciting, however — they’re all pitchers as you might have expected, and while they might end up pinch-running in space at some point, it’s in our best interest to identify hitters who would thrive. It takes a bit of scrolling to get pass the dozens of lanky pitchers, but I did find five hitters whose z-scores were just fine:
Yelich and Tatis Jr. are still great base-stealers in space. But Cordero, Tucker, and Fowler have the capability to surpass those two, despite swiping a combined 10 bags on Earth in 2020. Thanks to the weightlessness, their lack of raw strength is no longer an issue, allowing them to achieve much more.
There are some familiar and some surprising names here, which is great, but this analysis is far from perfect. Part of the problem is within the data. Height is rounded to the nearest whole number, so I couldn’t make fine distinctions between players. This resulted in many identical z-scores, which defeats their purpose. Furthermore, a better approach would give more weight to weight than height. I’d imagine that a better jump matters more than a few extra inches, but I also haven’t taken a physics class since middle school.
Whatever the case, this is merely a fun exercise. In Cistulli’s article, Kurt Suzuki is the home run king in space. If so, does Kyle Tucker put up a 40–40 season? Or, even better: if your fantasy team is lacking steals, it might be a better idea to pick up Franchy Cordero (175 lb, 6-foot-3) than Adalberto Mondesí (200 lb, 6-foot-1). You’re welcome, RotoGraphs.
All data from Baseball-Reference and Sean Lahman’s baseballr package
