On the latest episode of The Ringer MLB Show, Space Week extends to the sports world. Ben Lindbergh and Michael Baumann chatted with Ira Steven Behr, an executive producer and writer for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, about that show’s famous baseball episode, “Take Me Out to the Holosuite.” Behr discussed the episode’s origins, the difficulties of shooting baseball scenes in the Trek universe, and why the one-off idea made sense within the broader show’s timeline.
Listen to the full podcast here. This conversation has been edited and condensed.
Baseball in Star Trek was a response to—and tribute to—Michael Piller
Deep Space Nine cocreator Michael Piller, like Behr, was a big baseball fan—a passion that ran in his family. “His mother had written the Mets’ theme song,” Behr said. “The original one—‘Meet the Mets, greet the Mets.’ So that was pretty cool.”
But the show’s canon said that baseball died out in 2042, as society simply moved too fast for the bucolic sport. “The first thing he had done was kill baseball,” Behr said, “which I never stopped giving him a hard time about because it was such a Michael thing to do, to kill the thing he loves the most.”
Although it was killed off so early, the sport’s ultimate inclusion in DS9 was a long time coming. “From the very beginning, I told him, ‘I'm gonna get baseball back in the 24th century,’” Behr said. “Baseball was a big part of my friendship with Michael, and it was a ticking bomb waiting to be reinstated in the Star Trek franchise.”
“I didn't know Michael would be gone so soon after the show went off the air,” he added, “so I always see that show as a tribute to Michael, ahead of time.”
Sisko’s fandom was a natural character trait
“One of the things that is always difficult to do in establishing human beings in the 24th century is to come up with something that seems real and truthful to that time, but is something we can understand and relate to,” Behr said. “It’s a big problem—you can't say, what do they read ... and music, what do they listen to? Well, they listen to classical music because who the hell knows what contemporary music's going to sound like in the 24th century?”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, baseball fit that timeless, nostalgic niche—and it worked on a deeper level for the protagonist, too. “With Sisko, it seemed like baseball was an easy, understandable icon for him,” Behr said. “At the same time, because the story began in the pilot with a man who would suffer a great loss in losing his wife, it would seem like, yes, Benjamin Sisko would be a fan of something that no longer really seemed to exist. So it worked on a lot of different levels.”
The actors enjoyed the shoot, but it wasn’t easy for the production team
“The actors loved it,” Behr said. “The actors had a hoot doing it. Like [‘Badda-Bing, Badda-Bang’], which was a gambling episode, it was kind of off the main story line, the darkness of the war, that I just thought was a lot of fun. It really worked.”
Behr also recalled a special costuming request from Avery Brooks, the actor who played Sisko, that made it into the episode. “His favorite player was Dick Allen,” Behr said. “And that was the first thing he said to me once we knew the script was through the pipeline and we were doing it, and it was going to the department heads and the pre-production meeting. Avery came up to me and said, ‘I want Dick Allen's number on my back.’”
But baseball is never an easy sport to shoot, which was especially the case for a show on DS9’s production schedule and budget. “The [biggest] problem is, it's not like today where some shows shoot nine, 10 days an episode. We were shooting seven-day episodes,” Behr said. “It's just getting the coverage and making the plays and getting the camera—we were lucky if we had two cameras on the day. So it was just getting enough footage so you could cut it to make it look interesting. And also what we did, which I thought was smart, is we made the story around the game important to Sisko, so that you didn't need to do the entire episode at the game.”
From the perspective of actors who may not have been natural ballplayers, Behr and the writing team made the learning curve easier “by saying the Niners aren’t going to win.” That decision removed one main source of concern, and pressure on the actors. “All they have to do is score a run, a symbolic victory,” Behr said.
Ironically, the actor who portrayed DS9’s worst baseball player—Max Grodénchik, playing Rom—was the best player in the cast, which required another production workaround. “Max was not as poor a player as he is in the show,” Behr said. “I believe we made him lefty because he was naturally a righty—we did something like that so he would look less graceful in the field.”
Ultimately, the episode was an unusual step for the series—but that wrinkle made it follow the show’s themes even more acutely
Coming in the middle of a war, and on the heels of a popular character’s death, a baseball episode might have seemed like a hitch in DS9’s last-season step. But Behr believed that kind of inclusion would better follow the patterns of real life. “One of the things I've always hated about television is you're usually stuck telling the same kind of story, basically, every week because that's what the fans are attuned to and what they're expecting,” he said. “So every cop show, it's the case of the week, and every medical show, someone is sick. It has to be that way because it's what is expected. Everyone has had tragedies and hard times in their lives, but within those times, you can have a really crappy week, but there was a two-hour space within that week where you actually laughed. … That's how life is. And I just thought, yeah, it's a bad time in the 24th century for the Federation, but even so, human beings need to let loose, they need to turn the page, they need to have a change, and that's how life is, I find. I really wanted the show to reflect that.”
And it’s not as if the episode focused only on baseball and nothing else. It was about Sisko’s character and background, for one, and it allowed Behr to engage in a small dose of nostalgic storytelling, too. “It was a way to make the Vulcans the villains—with a small ‘v,’ obviously,” he said. “Back in the day, I sided with McCoy a lot. Back in the Bronx [where Behr grew up], emotions ran high all the time, but everyone wore their emotions like they were ready to beat the living hell out of you or embrace you. It was either death or glory. So the Vulcans have always been a little suspect. And not only that, but it was a chance to go back to the whole ‘the Vulcans not really getting us,’ which was a nice tip of the hat, I thought, to the original series.”