Astronauts Throw A Pitch In Space To Kickstart This Year's World Series [Watch]

This year, the world series started on a high note. The astronauts from the International Space Station (ISS) threw a pitch in space to celebrate the start of the world series.

In a video shared by Major League Baseball's Twitter account, four astronauts of the current Expedition 68 mission can be seen, in which one throws the pitch, and another astronaut catches it. The video was to celebrate Game 1 of the World Series, in which the Philadelphia Phillies won over the Houston Astros 6 to 5 on Friday.

The tweet captioned, "NASA expedition 68 crew is ready for Game 1 #world series," has four astronauts in attendance -- NASA astronauts Josh Cassada, Nicole Mann, and Frank Rubio and Japan's Koichi Wakata, reported Space.com.

There are three other crewmates of the mission — cosmonauts Anna Kikina, Dmitry Petelin, and Sergey Prokopyev — who cannot be seen in the video.

"We're super excited to watch the World Series come back to Space City," Expedition 68 NASA astronaut Josh Cassada said in the video.

"We wanted to take a moment to wish both teams good luck in the games ahead," Mann could be heard saying in the video, after which Rubio tossed a baseball to Wakata.

Wakata exclaimed "Play Ball!" as he caught the ball flawlessly, just in front of the camera. That the Japanese astronaut had 347 days of space experience before joining his latest expedition, SpaceX's Crew-5 mission, certainly showed in his perfect catch.

This is not the first time that the ISS astronauts have shown interest in ball sports. There have been times in the past where ISS astronauts engaged in ball-related sports in orbit like soccer and golf. The astronauts try to engage students in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) careers through their antics.

The Astros took game 2, but the Phillies won game 3 of the series, which the teams played Tuesday after it was postponed from Monday. The best-of-seven series will prove to be quite the tournament.

Previously, NASA astronaut Jack Fischer had shared a clip featuring another fun activity, water ping-pong. It was a throwback from Fischer from when he played the one-of-a-kind sport with former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson.