Star Trek: 15 Best Holodeck Moments
10. Take Me Out To The Holosuite - Find Him And Kill Him!
After six years of a baseball sitting on Sisko's desk, he finally gets to play a game on screen. And it almost causes him to blow a gasket.
Ira Stephen Behr had one criticism about the episode and it is the fact that roughly halfway through the episode, the main drive moves away from Sisko's rivalry on Solok and becomes more about Rom. While the emotional climax of the episode benefits from this, allowing Rom to score that final point for the team, Behr notes that this hadn't been the initial intent and had come about somewhat accidentally.
Max Grodénchick was ironically the best player in real life by far and had been semi-professional in high school. He plays left-handed here as he was physically incapable of playing badly with the bat in the correct position. Avery Brooks, Ciroc Lofton, Armen Shimmerman and Aron Eisenberg was also fairly skilled players. Conversely, Nana Visitor was by far the worst player on the team.
The episode also manages to offer a tribute to Ciroc Lofton's uncle, the professional baseball player Kenny Lofton. While Jake is helping to train the team, he wears an Atlanta Braves hat, where Lofton had played the previous year.
Trivia: when the Vulcan fails to touch the plate and Nog finds him to tag him out, by the time that this episode was filmed, he wouldn't have needed to. The player would have been deemed out as soon as he had left the field of play without touching the plate.
Learning something new every day.