User Reviews

Ex-baseball player (Marc Singer), whose career was cut short by injuries, is given a 75-year old baseball card by a teenager (Amber Lea Weston) who idolizes him. The card turns out to have magical powers that transport him back to the 1910s, to complete the career of the player on the card, whose career also happened to end due to injury.

"Extra Innings" is a good-natured enough episode about wish fulfillment, but the story is seriously undermined by a script that makes the Singer character two-dimensional: likable, but a bit of an unrealistic doofus. While Singer does the best he can with the material, the script really doesn't give him enough meat to work with in respect to the darker manifestations of his disappointments. Instead, we are presented with a man who apparently has no interest beyond playing the game (which might be more compelling if his character was given more of an overt competitive spirit), and who lacks even the imagination to find a way to move on with his life in a way that keeps him connected to the game he loves.

As such, Tom Palmer's script plays more like a paler version of the original series' "The Sixteen Millimeter Shrine" (another episode about longing for the past, with a much less likable lead character) than one that can stand on its own two feet. The episode isn't helped any by the cheesy special effect allowing Singer's character to enter the past, or by the incredible leap of logic involving the teenager tearing the card to allow Singer to keep living in the past (how does she know that this won't result in some horrible end for Singer's character?).

On the plus side, Singer is at least engaging in the lead, and Weston is good as his adoring friend. The final special effect involving the statistics on the baseball card is also kind of cute.

In short, a pleasant enough way to pass a half-hour, but it could have been so much more.

Marc Singer is delightful as a crippled former baseball star still in love with the game but unable to play. A girl (Tracy New) thinks the world of him and his enthusiasm for baseball is intoxicating. She's a fastball pitcher and he's always at her games, rooting for her. Well his wife (Amber Weston) wants him to grow up and get a job. He's always trading cards and talking baseball while she works and pays all the bills. She's fed up. Singer is given a special card going way back before Babe Ruth by New and both realize his stats and that player's are eerily similar. In fact, the card actually awakens him, emanating light, allowing him to go back in time and replace the player who suffered a blow to the head that sent him into a coma he never recovered from! Singer keeps going back, leading his team to a possible pennant! Weston is tired of Singer and his singular focus of baseball, telling New her adulation and idol worship of him should cease. New sees that Singer would be better off playing the game he loves than catering to the wife who wants him to sell computers. Fantasy that is perfectly Twilight Zone. A bum leg holds a baseball star from continuing to play in a game he loves. When he gets another chance, with both legs operational, an eye for the baseball and slugger swing to match, Singer is able to relive the glory and spirit of the game. And if anyone deserves a second chance it is the exuberant and excitedly appealing Singer. This is a satisfying episode.