'Deep Space Nine' Celebrates Baseball's Big Day

The Star Trek franchise has hit several episodes out of the park over the years, but none did quite so like Deep Space Nine's season seven offering, “Take Me Out to the Holosuite.” The premise alone was a keeper – Solok, an old Starfleet classmate of Sisko's challenges him and his DS9 crew to a game of baseball. Solok isn't only a captain, but a Vulcan – and so is his whole crew.

Vulcans playing baseball? Worf, of all people, in a baseball uniform? The ever-cranky Odo as an umpire? This is exactly the sort of premise that made DS9 so great and today, Major League Baseball's Opening Day, feels like the perfect time to revisit this classic episode. As directed with a very light hand by Chip Chalmers, it was just as preposterous and entertaining as one might expect.

Max Grodenchik, a natural right-hander, played Rom as a lefty. Why? Grodenchik was so good in high school that he considered playing professional baseball. He went lefty for “Take Me Out to the Holosuite” in order to make Rom look as awful on the field as the character was supposed to be.

DS9 executive producer Michael Piller was a huge baseball fan. He had baseball cards and baseballs in his office at Paramount, but it was actually Ronald D. Moore who penned the teleplay and Ira Steven Behr who shepherded “Take Me Out to the Holosuite” through the production process.

This seventh season episode was based on “The Ol Ball Game,” a 1985 episode of the series… Fame. And guess who wrote that episode? Behr himself.

Cirroc Lofton is the nephew of real-life former MLB star Kenny Lofton. The elder Lofton was still an active player at the time.

The Anthem of the United Federation of Planets is performed for the first – and only – time on screen.

Gregory Wagrowski, who played Solok, returned to the Trek fold several years later to guest star as Ceris in the Enterprise episode "Chosen Realm."

"Holosuite” marked the last Trek episode directed by Chalmers, who’d previously helmed several TNG episodes and the DS9 hour, “The Magnificent Ferengi.” Chalmers left directing in 2003 to teach at Florida State University’s College of Motion Picture Arts, and remained there until recently. He now lives in Los Angeles again, where he pursues his love of… magic. As the longstanding member of The Magic Castle puts it, “It’s what I’ve always done.”