One of my favorite shows of all times was M*A*S*H. Some of the earlier episodes don’t hold up so well, but one which sticks out is “A War for All Seasons.” Why, you may ask? Because baseball.
Stiers — who passed away last Saturday at the age of 75 — played the imperious Major Charles Emerson Winchester III (center) and featured prominently in that installment.
Rather than reinvent the wheel, here’s what Bruce Markusen, manager of digital and outreach learning at the Baseball Hall of Fame, posted on The Hardball Times site in a recent piece about baseball references in M*A*S*H over the years (and there were quite a few):
“A War for All Seasons” (1980)
M*A*S*H’s most baseball-centric episode covers the entire year of 1951, again using the Dodgers and the Giants as a backdrop. Charles Winchester (played by David Ogden Stiers), who knows nothing about baseball, decides to take the other doctors up on a bet; he puts his money on the “sure-thing” Dodgers, who are holding on to a massive 14-game lead in the National League pennant race, but gives the other bettors in camp favorable odds. As the episode progresses, Charles takes advice from Klinger and learns more and more about our national pastime, but becomes increasingly worried as the Dodgers’ lead shrivels to nothing. Winchester begins to warn Klinger of the dangerous ramifications should they surrender the pennant to the Giants.
Toward the end of the episode, we see Winchester pacing back and forth as he listens to an Armed Forces Radio transmission of the final tiebreaking game between the Dodgers and the Giants. As the play-by-play announcer (who is not Russ Hodges, but rather a voice actor) delivers the news of Bobby Thomson’s pennant-winning home run, Charles is left crushed, knowing that he owes a fortune to the rest of the camp. He drops his Dodgers cap to the ground; a moment later, we see him lying on his back, having passed out from the shock of the Dodgers’ loss.
The episode closes with the camp watching a highlight reel of the events of 1951. When the reel shows a replay of the Thomson home run, Charles charges toward the front of the mess tent brandishing a large kitchen knife and begins to slash the screen to pieces. Then, looking for Klinger, whom he blames for his wave of betting losses, Winchester shouts, “Where is that Lebanese mongoose?”
This 1980 episode has drawn some criticism for the way that it distorts the M*A*S*H timeline, which was already questionable given that the Korean War lasted only three years while M*A*S*H was already into its ninth season. But the use of the Dodgers/Giants’ story line is effective in moving the episode from spring to summer to fall, while also reminding us of the importance of baseball as a diversion for those doctors and soldiers trapped in the midst of war.
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