Jose Altuve, Baseball’s Unlikeliest Superstar

Part of baseball’s charm is the everyman nature of its players. Though some stars are the types of muscular super-humans who populate sports like football and basketball, others are lanky, beer-bellied, stocky, or short. The leading man of your favorite team may possess talent you can barely fathom, but he also might be visibly indistinguishable from the guy next door.

Even so, baseball players like Jose Altuve are simply not supposed to exist.

Altuve, the Houston Astros’s 27-year-old second baseman, is the shortest player in baseball, listed at 5 feet 6 inches and sometimes to be even smaller. He is also the frontrunner for the American League MVP award, fresh off a season in which he won his third AL batting title in four years and in Baseball-Reference’s player value