The true story of Star Trek’s most famous baseball game

Pa Chris Snellgrove
| Published 32 seconds ago

Star Trek has often been strangely fixated on baseball. Deep space ninefor example, shows that Captain Sisko is very fond of the old sport and keeps a baseball in his office as a prize. This spinoff even gave us a fun baseball game pitting the DS9 team against the sassy Vulcans, and fans still love to cosplay by wearing the same Niners baseball jerseys as in the episode “Take Me Out To the Holosuite.” However, Star Trek. the majority The famous baseball game was possibly the one referred to in the The next generation episode “Evolution”, which mentions the 1951 National League tiebreaker game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants.

The Star Trek author loves baseball

If you’re one of the many Star Trek fans who don’t watch much baseball in real life, the main plot of Evolution can be confusing. This episode features an eccentric scientist with a passion for baseball, and instead of recreating classic games in a holodeck, he recreates them in his mind as a reward for himself. He demonstrates his ability to do this by reciting “Lockman on first, Dark on second, Thomson at the plate, Branco on the mound,” a direct reference to the aforementioned matchup between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants, though the retelling makes some important mistakes.

Star Trek: the next generation showrunner Michael Peeler wrote Evolution and is a huge baseball fan (more on that later), and he chose this game because it’s special. This clash of baseball titans resulted in the so-called “Shot Heard Around the World.” That’s the nickname of New York Giants outfielder Bobby Thomson, who hit a ninth-inning home run to help his team win the National League pennant. It made this 1951 game memorable for sports fans, but the baseball superfan at the center of Evolution, Dr. Paul Stubbs, actually gets major details wrong when he talks about the game.

Despite Star Trek guru Michael Peeler’s great love for baseball, he got some details wrong when he wrote to Stubbs: “Lockman on first, Darke on second, Thomson at the plate, Branco on the mound.” With Giants shortstop Clint Hartung out, the lineup was a little different. To be completely accurate, former prodigy Stubbs should have said “Lockman at second, Hartung at third, Thomson at the plate, Branco on the mound.”

While he may have gotten some details wrong, we doubt the late, great Peeler lost any sleep over that mistake… after all, it was this Star Trek script and the baseball references in it that helped him get a job as a show host. The next generation. Before Piller, Michael Wagner was briefly the showrunner, but soon left the production, and the script for Evolution helped Piller win over executive producer Rick Berman. Peeler later said that Berman “shared my love of baseball” and that Stubbs’ speech “got right in his eye,” leading to a “partnership” in which Peeler became showrunner of the wildly popular science fiction spinoff

Here you go folks: when Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Evolution” wasn’t so much into baseball, Michael Peeler might not have gotten the show’s host job, and PNG could have continued to be something of a hot mess instead of “developing” into one of the greatest shows in television history. And without Berman and Peeler’s mutual love of America’s greatest pastime, we might not have gotten Captain Sisko’s own baseball obsession, much less “Take Me to the Hololux,” a near-perfect episode of DS9.

As a franchise, Star Trek fans owe a lot to the creators’ passionate love of baseball, so we’re here to ask the big question: When is Trek baseball legend Buck Bocay finally get yours Picarskysolo series in style?