"Mouth" McGarry, the manager of a broken-down baseball team called the Hoboken Zephyrs on its last legs, allows a robot named Casey to play on his team. Casey has the ability to throw super-fast balls that cannot be hit. Eventually, after Casey is beaned by a ball and given a physical examination, the National League finds out and rules that Casey must be taken off the team because he is not human. Casey's inventor, Dr. Stillman, gives him an artificial heart to have him classified as human. But with a heart, Casey now has human emotions. He refuses to throw his fast balls anymore, saying that he feels empathy with the batter and does not want to ruin the batter's career by striking him out. With the team sure to fold soon, Dr. Stillman gives McGarry Casey's blueprints as a souvenir. Glancing at them, McGarry suddenly has a brilliant idea, as he runs off after Dr. Stillman to tell him his idea. Rumors later surface intimating that McGarry has used the blueprints to build a world-champion team of Casey robots.
Closing narration
Production
According to The Twilight Zone: Unlocking the Door to a Television Classic by Martin Grams, the entire production was originally filmed with Paul Douglas in the manager role. On Friday, September 11, 1959, the day after the episode finished shooting, Douglas died. Douglas had been, unbeknownst to anyone, suffering from an incipient coronary during the production; his performance was adversely affected, as on film, Douglas appeared mottled and out-of-breath. Writer and executive producerRod Serling felt that the circumstances of Douglas' death cast a pall over what was supposed to be a light-hearted comedic episode, and decided that a re-shoot was necessary. CBS refused to finance any re-shooting, so consequently, virtually the entire production was refilmed at the expense of Rod Serling's Cayuga Productions with Jack Warden in the team manager's role. The other roles were not recast, and as much footage from the original filming was used as possible, including a scene in which Douglas is seen in the distance, with his back to the camera, as the manager. Original director Alvin Ganzer was not available for the re-shoot, so Robert Parrish was brought to complete shooting; both are credited as directors on the finished episode. In Serling's original first-draft script, the team was supposed to have been the Brooklyn Dodgers, who, like the fictitious "Hoboken Zephyrs", moved west in 1958 to become the Los Angeles Dodgers. The closing narration refers to the original draft: at the time of broadcast, the Dodgers had beaten the Chicago White Sox to win the previous year's World Series, doing so with a dominant pitching staff featuring Don Drysdale, Johnny Podres and a young Sandy Koufax. The baseball scenes were filmed at the Los Angeles version of Wrigley Field, an often-used venue for Hollywood films featuring baseball action scenes. The TV seriesHome Run Derby was also filmed at Wrigley, and also aired that summer of 1960. The Wrigley footage, with the stands empty, was supplemented by brief clips of stock-footage crowd scenes, from the Polo Grounds and Fenway Park.
