So how do you define a Thark's strike zone?

This is brilliant. While Major League Baseball continues to make most decisions with its head stuck up its rear, the good folks running Little League Baseball are really planning ahead. There may be hope for this sport, after all: Little League gives Virginia jurisdiction over Mars

Naturally, there will be some necessary interpretation of the rules. Not everything translates nicely between Earth and Mars at a 1:1 ration. For example:

Of course, the expansion to Mars raises several logistical issues for Little League, particularly with the always sticky question of age. Children must be age 12 or under to participate in Little League's core program, and Little League officials have struggled to enforce that requirement in some recent scandals at its World Series.

The Martian expansion muddles the issue, because a Martian year lasts 687 earth days. So a 12-year-old in Martian years would actually be 22 in Earth years.

Also, Martian gravity is a third of that on Earth, so a 200-foot home-run fence would have to be extended to 600 feet on Mars.

It also gives rise to endless controversy, which baseball thrives on. On Babylon 5, when one character mentioned that Mars' team had reached the World Series for the first time in history, another argued with him over the validity of the Martian team's home run record set that season--whether Mars' lower gravity and thinner atmosphere warranted an asterisk in the record books or not. Not unlike the second-guessing the Colorado Rockies face daily, come to think of it...

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