By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Star Trek has often been weirdly fixated on baseball. Deep Space Nine, for example, shows that Captain Sisko has a fierce passion for the old sport and keeps a baseball in his office as a prize possession. That spinoff even gave us a hilarious baseball game pitting the DS9 crew against snooty Vulcans, and fans still love to cosplay by wearing the same Niners baseball jerseys worn in the episode “Take Me Out To the Holosuite.” However, Star Trek’s most famous baseball game was arguably the one referenced in The Next Generation episode “Evolution” which references the 1951 National League tiebreaker showdown between the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants.
Star Trek Writer Loves Baseball
If you’re one of the many Star Trek fans who don’t watch much real-life baseball, a major plot point in “Evolution” might have been confusing. This episode features an eccentric scientist with a passion for baseball, and rather than recreating classic games in the holodeck, he recreates them in his mind as a kind of reward to himself. He demonstrates his ability to do so by reciting “Lockman on first, Dark on second, Thomson at the plate, Branca on the mound,” which directly references the aforementioned match between the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants, though the recounting makes some crucial mistakes.
Star Trek: The Next Generation showrunner Michael Piller wrote “Evolution” and is a huge baseball fan (more on this later), and he chose this game because it’s so special. This clash of the baseball titans led to the so-called “Shot Heard ‘Round the World.” That’s the affectionate nickname for New York Giants outfielder Bobby Thomson’s walk-off home run in the ninth inning, one that allowed his team to win the National League pennant. This made that 1951 game unforgettable for sports lovers, but the baseball superfan at the heart of “Evolution,” Dr. Paul Stubbs, actually gets major details wrong when recounting the game.
Despite Star Trek guru Michael Piller’s great love of baseball, he got a few details wrong when he wrote Stubbs as saying “Lockman on first, Dark on second, Thomson at the plate, Branca on the mound.” Because Giants player Clint Hartung had been switched out, the lineup was a bit different. To be completely accurate, former wunderkind Stubbs should have said “Lockman on second, Hartung on third, Thomson at the plate, Branca on the mound.”
While he might have gotten a few details wrong, we doubt the late, great Piller lost any sleep over the mistake…after all, it was this Star Trek script and its baseball references that helped him get the job as showrunner of The Next Generation. Before Piller, Michael Wagner was briefly the showrunner but soon left production, and the “Evolution” script helped Piller win over executive producer Rick Berman. Piller later said that Berman “shared my love for baseball” and that Stubbs’ speech “hit him right between the eyes,” leading to a “partnership” in which Piller became showrunner of this insanely popular sci-fi spinoff.
There you have it, folks: if the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Evolution” hadn’t geeked out so much about baseball, Michael Piller might not have gotten the showrunner job, and TNG could have continued being something of a hot mess instead of “evolving” into one of the greatest shows in television history. And without Berman and Piller’s mutual love of America’s greatest pastime, we might not have gotten Captain Sisko’s own baseball obsession, much less “Take Me Out To the Holosuite,” a nearly perfect DS9 episode.
As a franchise, Star Trek fans owe much to the creators’ passionate love of baseball, which is why we’re here to ask the big question: when will Trek baseball legend Buck Bokai finally get his own Picard-style solo series?
