Wednesday morning, it was down to five days, 21 hours and 56 minutes until Major League Baseball play between the Boston Red Sox and Oakland Athletics begins in Japan.

And in a game of so many earned-run statistics and on-base percentages, it seems there's more to it than pitch counts and fastball speeds.

Like ... the weather.

No, not so much because it leaves Chicago White Sox fans shivering in the April snow or sends the Cleveland Indians to play in Milwaukee for their home opener.

It's weather that affects the aerodynamics of the game and can mean the difference between a game-winning home run or a routine fly ball.

Most people watch the flag at a ballpark and know that winds will affect the game.

But so does temperature, humidity and barometric pressure.

At NASA, scientists who clearly must love the game, too, developed models that help the students of Purdue University professor Howard Zelaznik's "The Science of Baseball" class understand the kinesiology of the players.

And the mechanics of the game — including how the same matchup on a cold, damp night in Detroit would truly be a whole different ballgame on a hot, dry afternoon for the Padres in San Diego.

For example, let's imagine that cold night in Detroit with Magglio Ordonez at the plate.

The barometric pressure is average, at 29.92 with a temperature of 35 degrees. The humidity's 100 percent — naturally, in late March, something must be falling from the sky along the Great Lakes — and the wind speed is 5 mph.

The windup. The pitch? And there goes a fly ball for 378 feet at a height of 105 feet. It stays in the air for 5.2 seconds. And that matters in center field, right?

Get outta the yard ... get outta the yard ... And as the outfielders try to chase that down, Zelaznik said in a press release, he tells his Purdue students that the players are watching much, much more than we are.

And it's the weather that alters the ball's trajectory.

Now, if you take Ordonez down to a warmer climate, on the exact same day for the exact same pitch?

There, it's 90 degrees without any wind at all. There's no humidity and the pressure, at 30.9, is high. When that ball takes to flight, it travels 350 feet instead of an extra 28, reaching a height of 107 feet and staying aloft for 5.0 seconds.

Perhaps few agencies are in a better position to appreciate the technical aspects of baseball than NASA is.

And that's not even counting the intergalactic, shooting-star swing of Roy Hobbs in "The Natural."

It's the much more down-to-earth factors of, say, a 40 percent chance of rain or an insect-attack-inducing heat wave that might make the game more ... interesting.

To check out the online NASA weather calculator and other baseball-related physics tools, go to http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/K-12/baseball/index.html.

Five days now. 21 hours. And 17 minutes ...