San Francisco Giants Reveal Their Surprising Top Star Trek Episodes—You Won’t Believe Their Picks!

So, with all that background to maybe make the case, I figured we could play a little game here on Star Trek’s 60th birthday. The traditional television season (fall to spring) doesn’t really lineup with the traditional baseball schedule, which adds a fun little wrinkle to this idea. If we look at the TV schedule and the baseball schedule, what episode airdates coincided with Giants wins? If the Giants won on a day a new episode of Star Trek aired, then let’s stamp that episode as GOOD. And just because it ought to be considered part of The Original Series canon, I’m expanding the list to include episodes from the 22-episode Star Trek: The Animated Series that ran from 1973-1974.

If you want some less ridiculous measures of episode quality, you can consult many sorces that rank episodes of not just The Original Series, but all the series, from the 1991 Star Trek Viewers Choice Marathon that made a lasting impression on me to a recent ranking of the Top 60 episodes according to fans at the big Star Trek convention in Las Vegas, to my very own Star Trek podcast, Trek Marry Kill, which grades episodes by tiers: TREK (fine/good), MARRY (excellent/all-timer), KILL (watch it once or never).

The “did the Giants win on a day a new episode of Star Trek aired” game is maybe not as fun as “which Simpsons episodes premiered on days when Barry Bonds homered?” which I did on Twitter over a decade ago and this list has episodes that would never be included on a Best Of list, but this can be the joyful mess we make when we meld geek stuff with jock stuff.

For this post, I’ll just stick with The Original Series & The Animated Series, even though there are 12 series in total. Unfortunately, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1973, and 1974 weren’t playoff seasons in Giants history, though the franchise did go 362-285 (.560). Star Trek: The Original Series aired its final episode on June 3, 1969, which means that it survived long enough to see the creation of the National League West (the Giants went 90-72, 2nd place in the division’s first year of existence). The 1973 (88-74) and 1974 (72-90) seasons were the first of the post-Willie Mays seasons. To sort the rankings, we’ll go with margin of victory and any historical accomplishments within the game. Only 11 times in the run of Star Trek and Star Trek: The Animated Series did the San Francisco Giants win a baseball game on a day when a new episode premiered.

11. “Who Mourns for Adonais?” (9/22/67) | Giants 1, Pirates 0 (+1)

This episode is best known for featuring a giant hand in space holding the starship Enterprise in place.

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Summary: An underrated episode in the pantheon of the franchise. This one really solidifies two long-standing Star Trek tropes: (1) god is a jerk and (2) earth was visited by ancient aliens. In this case, the Greek gods were actually aliens, and only one of them has bothered to stick around in our dimension: Apollo. He wants the Enterprise to worship him and he wants one of the crewmembers to become his woman.