Baseball Facts for Kids

Forget what you know about throwing a rock really far. Glen Gorbous set the world record for the longest throw of a baseball on August 1, 1957. That is 445 feet, 10 inches!

To put that in perspective, a standard professional football field is 100 yards long, which is exactly 300 feet. Gorbous threw that ball nearly 1.5 football fields away!

He was given a running start for this exhibition throw, but still—that’s an arm strength you just don't see every day for kids playing catch.

When a pitcher throws the ball, it’s like launching a rocket! The official Guinness World Record for the fastest pitch belongs to Aroldis Chapman, who clocked an insane 105.8 mph fastball back in 2010.

Imagine a car driving down the highway—that’s about 60 mph. This pitch was almost twice as fast! That’s why batters have less than half a second to decide whether to swing!

Even the average MLB starting pitcher throws around 92-95 mph. To be that much faster is legendary.

Most kids can’t even sit still for one extra inning, but these players played 32 innings overnight! This epic minor league game in 1981 between the Pawtucket Red Sox and Rochester Red Wings was stopped at 4:09 AM!

They didn't finish until June 23, 1981—over two months after the first pitch! That's like pausing your favorite TV show for a whole season before watching the finale!

The final score was a mere 3–2, proving that sometimes, the longest journey leads to the smallest victory!

To throw a baseball, you need a long arm, and this legend had the longest! Randy Johnson, nicknamed 'The Big Unit,' was an incredible 6 feet, 10 inches tall when he started playing in 1988.

That’s taller than two average 4th graders stacked on top of each other! Imagine a pitcher who seems to throw the ball from the clouds—that was him!

He used that giant size to rack up 4,875 strikeouts, which is the second most of all time!

You might think hitting one home run is awesome, but hitting four in a single game? That’s unheard of! Only 21 players in all of MLB history have managed this amazing power display.

The most recent person to join this super-exclusive club was Kyle Schwarber in 2025! It’s so hard that no player has ever done it twice in their career!

It's considered 'baseball's greatest single-game accomplishment' because you have to be on fire for every single at-bat!

While many stadiums are shiny and new, Fenway Park in Boston is a true time capsule! It first opened its gates way back in 1912, the same year the Titanic sank!

This means players from over a century ago played under those same lights (eventually!). It’s so old, it has the famous 37-foot-high Green Monster left-field wall.

It’s been around for so long, it’s seen more baseball history than any other stadium currently in use!

For decades, baseball was strictly a sunny-day sport! It took the introduction of massive electric lights to change everything.

The first official MLB night game was played in Cincinnati on May 24, 1935. The lights used over 600 lamps that lit up the field brighter than anything before!

President Franklin D. Roosevelt even helped by pressing a button in the White House to turn them on!

How amazing is this for dedication? Pitcher Satchel Paige pitched his final MLB game on September 25, 1965, when he was 59 years and 80 days old!

He pitched three full innings, giving up just one hit and zero runs! That's better than many players half his age!

He started his career way back in the Negro Leagues in 1926, showing he was a superstar across different eras of baseball for kids.

Imagine playing baseball on top of a mountain! Denver's Coors Field sits at an amazing 5,200 feet above sea level—that's over a mile high!

Because the air is thinner up there, the ball doesn't slow down as much, meaning home runs sail way over the fence. It’s like playing with a lighter ball!

To help balance this, in 2002, the team started storing the baseballs in a special box called a humidor to keep them from flying too far!

Running the bases fast is key, but some runners are just unbelievable blurs! Modern technology called Statcast measures players’ top sprint speeds in feet per second.

The speediest players today can reach over 30.4 feet per second, which is super fast for human legs!

For a fun comparison, some of the legends of the past were so fast, they were timed circling all four bases in around 13.8 seconds!