Episode 115 - Squeeze play

A sports legend is forced into stealing valuable baseball memorabilia in order to pay off his gambling debts.

Okay episode made special by DEXTER!

Mac

Only an OK episode Mac? This episode was excellent. Dexter's third and last appearance.
Kent McCord as Novis Reilly was a great casting job.
The fights in this episode are terrific. Novis vs two bad guys, Novis vs Marsh and MacGyver vs Willard.
This episode is also full of actors we all saw before. Another Colton introduction, we saw Marsh in Second Chance as Skinner, Eli in Cease Fire as Head Master and this Willard we knew as Lopat in A Prisoner of Conscience and as Kate's husband in Friends. I also liked Reilly's daughter, Wendy.
This is one of the better episodes of the season to my opinion.

Yes. Sports stories bore me to tears and that yippy sports memorabilia collector whose name I can't be bothered to remember really annoys me. Besides Dexter, the only other thing I liked about this ep was Mama Colton and Mac's interactions with her. The whole bit with the suitcases at the beginning was hysterical.

Mac

I thought "Squeeze Play" was a great episode. This episode was set in the sports world- baseball specifically- but dealt more with Novus' problems with the blackmailers and his relationship with his daughter. And of course, the sports action is always great for me, speaking as a guy.
And yeah- we have the third and last appearance of Dexter Filmore and I think he was a great choice for Mac to use to buy the baseball cards. That was really great.
And we have another Colton family member show up- Mama Colton (and Frog the dog!)
It was a fun episode, especially with Wendy's enthusiasm! And MacGyver had some pretty cool MacGyverisms- figuring out the phone number and all. And I love how he stopped the bad guys- with Novus Riley's great hit! That was awesome!
And hey- Reggie Jackson is in the episode!!!

And I think by the end of the episode- Novus Riley came out learning a good lesson too. "There's some things it's just not right to put a price on."

Did anybody notice at the end where MacGyver throws the ball, that the ball doesn't spin at all. It's a perfect knuckleball. That kind of bugged me.

What's wrong with a bal that doesn't spin?

It just looked fake to me. It's pretty hard to throw a baseball and not have any backspin. And if he'd wanted the dude to hit it cleanly he wouldn't have thrown it this way.

Anyway I vote just OK for this episode.

I vote good. Dexter was great as usual. The end annoyed me though. Why didn’t they hit the ball through the back of the car window and try to knock the guy out or something rather then hitting a sign and relying on it to fall?

Sorry if this has already been talked of, but I've just been watching this ep, and it got me thinking, how soon was the Net available to the general public, and if not by an early version of the internet, how did Mama Colton use her computer to track stuff down, and how did Dexter expect the dodgy sales guy from that shop to track down the cards he wanted..? (It all sounded a bit like ebay!)

Bethany xx

Before the net there where things called BBS's (bulletin board systems)

They worked pretty much in the same way as this site works, the main difference being that anyone wanting to log in had to make a direct connection (via modem and phone line) to the BBS computer.

Most people who ran BBS's invested in multiple phone lines so they could have several people logged in at once.

These systems talked to each other on a daily basis (usually in the wee small hours of the morning) to upload and download messages, emails and indexing information... these BBS systems eventually evolved into the hubs which now form the internet.

In the two cases you mentioned above, Mama Colton was probably accessing some sort of law enforcement network, which would have basically been a group of maybe bounty hunters and police computers working in the way I described above.

The card hunt with Dexter would have involved a card collectors group. These kinds of "user groups" are what really drove the evolution of the Bulletin Board services into becoming the internet.

SO.. after all that geek waffle... those scenarios where based on current technology for the time the episodes where filmed.

Cool...

The family spent all night thinking of when the first 'net' tech would have been widely available...Guess Mama Colton went & invested in some kind of modem!

B xxx

Mama Colton is an awesome character!!

Only good thing in this episode is Dexter. I hate Coltons (Billy is a good character but other Coltons are extremely irritating). I also hate baseball and the plot involving baseball cards feels lame and childish.

I agree 100%, but the only good thing about this episode is Dexter...

I agree too loved Dexter in this one.

LOVED Dexter in this one! RDA plays him so well.
Loved Mama Colton, and the part with the suitcases at the start? Poor Mac didn't realise how heavy they were and had to haul them up the stairs. Hahaha that made me laugh out loud!

I don't usually like sports episodes, but this one was really good.

Does anyone remember the name of Ma Colton's computer? I think it was named after a philosopher or something. It's been bugging me for days now.

Thanks.

Alexandre Dumas (Alex for short) - "Named after the black French writer who wrote The Three Muskateers"

Wow. That just gave me a flash back to the days when people named their computers.

I remember it was quite common. Computers where treated as if they were intellegent beings which needed names to individualize them or something.

Interesting how our view of these machines has changed over the years.

My best friend's mother in high school had e-mail as early as 1987. She was then a programmer for Digital and is now a VP at Hewlett-Packard. I remember seeing printouts of her e-mails to and from her boyfriend. So that's one aspect of this episode that didn't even give me any pause at the time, even though I had never been near any such thing myself.

Yeah, I think I'd have a harder time identifying with it had I not grown up in the baseball culture. But I did and collected baseball cards til they came up my ears. Every day at recess, we'd all pair off with other collectors and fling them against the school wall, those whose card came closest to the wall, won the lot.

I don't collect baseball cards anymore, but I'm heavy into sports autographs & game used collectibles which was the real raison d'etre of those Squeeze Play thugs. Not that far fetched really - google 'OJ Simpson memorabilia' for starters if you think the trading of these goods is all kiddie stuff.

Love the 1990 timeline of this too with the bulletin board trading in high gear, the www a year away, ebay & amazon a mere 5 years from entering the scene. And a cameo by Mr. October himself. Great episode!!!!!

I love the episode, other than the extremely far fetched part where Mac throws the ball for Novis in order to hit the sign and for the sign to come down and stop the bad guy. Of all the least likely things that happen on the show that one was the worst in my opinion.

lmao. I fell asleep the other night in the middle of the scrap in the factory and missed the very end of it. You're right, absolutely ridiculous. I'd like to have some of what they were smoking the day they came up with that macgyverism. And wasn't that the million dollar ball that Mac hurls away? - surely scuffed, cut and or burnt after nuking the scoreboard the way it did - the 4th of July has nothing on that fireworks display.

Not bad, but it seemed better in my memory.

The plot is a little flat, has a diabolus ex machina, and you can see things coming when you look at the time.

Thank you for this explanation, even with the tradition in French I understood your message very well and in addition it solved a question that I had been wondering for a long time ...

Totally agree, she has a peach, an unfailing dynamism !!!

As he was eager to give his computer a nickname, it adds a little more dimension to the episode ...

This episode was not initially an advantage for me, because in France baseball is a sport almost unknown here, and yet I let myself lose the theme and this new area. If it’s not the quintessential episode either, it’s nothing to be ashamed of either.
Indeed Mac will be equal to himself, with a Mama Colton, who despite her age has an Olympic form, a "network" of contact and information and does not give up for a penny.
In addition, frog is in the game, I love this dog ... A few weeks ago, I was at a cafe and a client had a dog, identical to a frog, he was really beautiful and I couldn't think of something other than Macgyver and threw in Heaven to see him here, 2 meters from me.

Plus a new appearance from Dexter, I don't know how my RDA voice is when he's Dexter, but our pain French Edgar Givry is at the top, we have a Mac / Dexter to die for laughing, an exceptional dub, very very funny and quality.
The story, when it is well put together, no downtime, I let myself be spellbound by this grand cru and a sport that made me want to learn more about it.

And the end at the top, already for the fight, it is there welcome, and very well done the scene of the baseball ball thrown on the panel and which falls on the car, it can make laugh but me I made "waw »When I saw how it was filmed well and even 30 years later ...

5 ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️