Carl Sagan & Baseball

Carl Sagan was awesome. He “simultaneously emphasiz[ed] the value and worthiness of the human race, and the relative insignificance of the Earth in comparison to the universe.” This complexity aligns him with the aesthetics of NotGraphs, where we both celebrate the wondrous oddities of a human-made game (see any number of Carson Cistulli’s posts), and yet are all too aware of our insignificance as individuals and as a race of beings (see any number of Dayn Perry’s posts).

Baseballs and planets: of the same stuff.
All-Stars literary made of star stuff.

Thanks to the breadth of his career — he made science more appealing to the masses perhaps more than any other American scientist to date — and a dedicated following, he is not without connection to baseball. Consider this cartoon, inspired by Sagan, which depicts what baseball would be like on the Martian moon of Phobos. (Sorry, the video was not embeddable.)

He was immortalized [further] in collector’s card form by the same company that documents our favorite ball players (and squirrels), which you can purchase for your very own collection here.

Heavy hitter.

In his book, The Dragons of Eden, Sagan weighs in on why sports are so popular in contemporary cultures across the world, suggesting that modern athletes would have played the vital role of hunters in early human societies — a similarly admired lot. (Thanks to the According to Carl Sagan blog for this one.)

You can purchase Carl Sagan’s face on a baseball T.

And now, thanks to NotGraphs, you can have a jpeg of Carl Sagan wearing the cap of your favorite baseball team. Leave a comment, and I will email you said jpeg.

Naturally, Houston.

His roots, or closest to them.