Why do the O's have so many fans in outer space?

It's Sunday morning and it's time for Terry Virts to start doing his daily exercises. It's peaceful. It's quiet.

Of course, things always seem much quieter when you're 250 miles above the Earth.

The stars sparkle outside the International Space Station windows and Virts' home planet gleams in all its blues and greens just below. Otherwise, it's dark. Although, there is one soft glow right in the commander's line of vision.

A TV is showing sports. A baseball game. An Orioles game ... in space.

Virts watches intently, quietly cheering as his hometown O's score first.

"I'd watch the condensed game while lifting weights or on the treadmill or whatever," Virts told me in a call. "Probably watched a lot more baseball in space than I do on Earth."

Yes, for the entire 2015 season, astronaut Terry Virts watched his hometown Orioles while gliding through the Milky Way -- part of a string of years in Baltimore that included Buck Showalter managing, Adam Jones pieing and Chris Davis crushing.

"I didn't watch them live, MLB would make these condensed games," Virts said. "You could send up one whole game a week, but I didn't want that. So I just got these shortened games."

Virts' game-watching during the mid-2010s would, at times, go semi-viral on social media. He put the Orioles on the interstellar map sporting jerseys in the space station, posting about his team and snapping amazing photos of fields from way up above.

Strangely enough, Virts, inexplicably, isn't the only astronaut to watch the Orioles from outside of our planet. It's very likely that the team that calls Camden Yards home has the highest percentage of games watched while not on Earth.

Shane Kimbrough tuned into a John Means no-hitter from the space station in 2021. And during the 2018 baseball season, Ricky Arnold reached out to MLB with a similar request as Virts: I'm a big O's fan, can I somehow watch every single game while I'm up here for eight months?

But how exactly did they all watch baseball while levitating high above the world's surface?

"Some people were like, 'Well, can we give him like an MLB.TV subscription?'" Padraic Boyle, MLB Senior Director, Enterprise Media Product Development at MLB Advanced Media, told me over Zoom. "No, you're not gonna stream that to the space station."

Boyle, who worked with Arnold's mission, communicated with employees at NASA to, this time -- because technology was much better -- send full games up to the ISS.

"We had the ability when we capture games in our DIAMOND system, we could basically cut the game up into two chunks for them," Boyle said. "Then we would send that to NASA via our Aspera delivery system. So when the game was over, through this push method, NASA would get it. From their side, whenever, I guess, the space station came over Houston, they would beam it up to them."

So, Arnold, Virts and all the other O's astronaut fans wouldn't see the games until the day after. Still, it was better than nothing. A nice way to relax and unwind during their off-duty times. A boost to their mental health.

"Yeah, I had this dedicated time to exercise and somebody was uploading the videos," Virts said. "I listened to almost every game, too. The biggest one was the first day of Spring Training. And then Opening Day. Both were big morale boosts for me."

Arnold had even requested if Boyle and his team could provide access to MASN's Wall to Wall baseball show, something MLB didn't own.

Looking back on it now, Boyle is pretty amazed at the moment in his career. He took a job at Major League Baseball and ended up corresponding with NASA -- providing a product for astronauts in outer space.

"Honestly, it was unexpected and thrilling when the project came across my desk," Boyle said. "I mean, working with NASA was something I had never imagined would be part of my job. And enabling astronauts to watch their team while they’re in the International Space Station is just incredibly cool and surreal."

Although there does seem to be at least one Orioles fan currently working on baseball/rocket projects at NASA, there don't seem to be any current O's fans up in the space station. Who knows, though? Maybe that signal from the Orioles games years ago was somehow intercepted while being beamed up to the ISS and there are entire galaxies of Adley Rutschman and Heston Kjerstad worshippers. They'd definitely be into this year's team, who dominated their way to an AL East crown and an ALDS matchup this Saturday against the Rangers.

Virts, currently in Estonia, will be watching.

"It's been awesome," Virts, now retired after 213 days, 10 hours and 48 minutes in space, said. "There's that funny meme of LeBron James saying, 'It's about damn time.' It's like years of suffering, and we're finally here."