One for our American friends now! With baseball's World Series getting under way today, our bases are loaded and it's time to declare "batter up!" as we look at some of the sport's appearances in three of our favourite sci-fi shows.
Doctor Who may be distinctly British, with the Fifth favouring cricket as his sport of choice, so it seems unthinkable that he may trade that in for its Yankee equivalent, but it would take only one regeneration for him to get acquainted with baseball. The Sixth Doctor comic story Time Bomb found he and Frobisher arriving at Dodger Stadium, home to the Los Angeles Dodgers to collect Peri after she's been to the ball game.
In what could be a nod to his First incarnation's similar arrival at Lords in the Volcano episode of The Daleks' Master Plan, the more colourful of coat one lands the TARDIS in the middle of the ballpark in a quite literal case of who's on first!
That adventure was published within the pages of Doctor Who Magazine in 1986 - the same year Colin Baker rather unceremoniously got the order of the boot.
Sylvester McCoy would have chance to continue the Doctor's relationship with the game, as the novel Illegal Alien has him recounting his fondness for the sport and a trip he'd made to 1926 to watch Babe Ruth do his thing for the New York Yankees. Ruth's time at Yankee Stadium is often remembered as a high point for baseball itself, so the TARDIS picked a fortunate time to take the Doctor out to the ball park...
Switching universe's, and boarding Deep Space 9, we find baseball fan Benjamin Sisko in charge of proceedings. The Commander used the game to help the Prophets to understand linear time when he first encountered them in the pilot episode Emissary. He explained that the reason the game was worthwhile was that corporeal beings like Humans didn't know what the outcome would be. "Every time you throw this ball a hundred different things can happen in the game."
Sisko also kept a baseball on his desk in his office aboard Deep Space 9 and encouraged an interest in the game among his senior staff, including accepting a challenge to a game by the crew of the USS T'Kumbra in 2375.
400 Years prior to that, an alien called Josh Exley had discovered a love of, and a natural ability for, baseball in an episode of The X-Files titled The Unnatural...
Home-hitting shape-shifting Exley was terrified of having his secret talent discovered. He wasn't the only one as it turns out "all the great" baseball players are aliens! From Ruth, Mays, Gibson, Mantle, and DiMaggio.
OK then! The episode was written by David Duchovny himself, with the story inspired by real life. Possibly not the shape-shifting alien part, but Exley was based on Joe Bauman, a career minor leaguer who hit an unbelievable 72 home runs for the Roswell Rockets in 1954.
Duchovny wrote himself a scene where, as Mulder, he gets to introduce Scully to the correct way to swing a baseball bat...
...something that Ace from Doctor Who had no trouble with!
Of course, Ace's super-charged baseball bat wasn't used to hit home runs. She used hers to whack the bejesus out of a Dalek. Swing, batter batter...
All together now - take me out to the ball game......
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