Take me out to the ballgame, take me out to the crowd...oh, don't mind me, I'm just celebrating the return of spring training, with baseball and springtime right around the corner. But since you're here...Welcome back to Character Insight! This week, we review one of the greatest baseball players of the future, Buck Bokai. After all, when a Twitter account made in honor of such a player asks you to profile his character, how can you say no?
https://archive.org/details/CharacterInsightEp276
We first hear of Buck Bokai in the TNG episode The Big Goodbye, where he is an unnamed player referenced for his breaking of a longtime consecutive hits record set in 1941 by Joe DeMaggio. However, we do find out the name of this player until Deep Space 9, where Commander Sisko has a baseball card of the player seen in the episode The Storyteller. His full name is Harmon Buck Gin Bokai, which explains why he is generally just referred to as Buck or Buckaroo Bokai.
According to the statistics set on the baseball card, Bokai plays in minor leagues for four years before his debut in the Planetary Baseball League in 2019. Elon Musk better get those space settlements going soon if we are to have a Planetary League by next year!
During his career, Bokai plays briefly for the Crenshaw Monarchs, the Gothan City Bats, Tanis, and Seibu before moving on to a lengthy career with the London Kings. It is in this uniform that we see Bokai on the baseball card of Sisko, and later when aliens use his image from Ben Sisko's imagination in the episode If Wishes Were Horses to interact with the staff on the station. It is established in this episode that Bokai broke DeMaggio's streak of consecutive games with a hit in 2026, shortly after his arrival in London.
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According to his statistics, Bokai was a prolific home run hitter as a switch hitter in his early career, but then morphed into a consistent hit machine. He plays infield spots ranging from second base to third base. He is mentioned as having taken part in World Series in 2032, a loss to the Yankees ironically enough, and in 2042. Interest in baseball had waned to where only 300 people attended the final game of the 2042 World Series, which ended with a walk off home run by Bokai. The sport was suspended after this, adding to the legend of Buck Bokai. One would figure he made the Hall of Fame, if they still had such a thing after the sport ended.
The generation of this character was done by show executive producer Michael Pillar as a decorative item for Ben Sisko's desk, again reinforcing the love of baseball in the Commander. A model maker on staff named Greg Jain helped come up with the statistics of Bokai's playing career, and he in a baseball uniform was pictured as the player on the card. When another actor with high similarity in appearance was cast to play this role in If Wishes Were Horses, the baseball card was revised on the front photo to show the actor instead of Jain, although Jain is still shown on the back side picture. It's the small details like this one that add so much depth to the characters of a show like Deep Space 9. Plus it's fun to watch Ben Sisko fawn over a real baseball legend.
Sadly, we appear to be falling short in real life baseball of the timing and expectations for Buck Bokai, but as we learned from Back to the Future, that's what happens when you write the history of the near future. If a player names after the Buckaroo Banzai show appears as a rookie in the major leagues next spring, buy all the rookie cards and stock in him you can...as apparently he's destined for greatness.
Bokai was played by Keone Young, who was born in Hawaii and has had a long, successful acting and voice acting career. He also appears as Mr. Sato in an episode of Enterprise, as well as in the movies Crank, North, Dr. Doolittle 2, and Legally Blonde 2. He just turned 70 years old, but you can still hear him in upcoming episodes of the Ninja Turtles show on Nickolodeon...he just loves playing ninja warriors according to recent interviews of him at conventions.
Thanks random Twitter account of Buck Bokai for the suggestion. Woo-ee.
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