But Hey, the Baseball’s Pretty Good?
So the global thermonuclear war, ravages of climate change, and economic and political turmoil are all pretty bad. But baseball in 2024? Never been better.
A hilariously obscure factoid from Captain Sisko’s love of the ancient game, we learn in background ephemera from Deep Space Nine that 2024 is the year Harmon “Buck” Bokai, considered one of the greatest players of the game in human history, becomes the first solar system-wide batting champion while playing for Seibu in, presumably, Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball league, before moving to the London Kings in 2025. Just how an Earth still in the nascent stages of interplanetary exploration has a solar system-wide professional sports body has never been explained—there was at least, eventually, a Planetary Baseball League on Earth—but good for him!
Bokai would continue to play baseball for a variety of teams for the next two decades, when the professional livelihood of the sport came to an end in 2042 with the final World Series. Don’t ask how they kept playing professional baseball during the near-total-devastation of Earth, either.
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