There's a rumor, unsubstantiated, of course, that a manager named McGarry took them to the West Coast and wound up with several pennants and a couple of world championships.
[3]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.
Writer and executive producer Rod 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.
[2] The other roles were not recast, and as much footage from the original filming was used as possible, including (in the episode's final shot) a scene in which Douglas is seen in the distance, with his back to the camera, as the manager.
In Serling's original first-draft script (and in his short-story adaptation that appeared in the 1960 anthology, Stories from The Twilight Zone), the team was supposed to have been the Brooklyn Dodgers (their stadium in the original story was "Tebbet's Field"), 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.
[2] The Wrigley footage, with the stands empty, was supplemented by brief clips of stock-footage crowd scenes, from the Polo Grounds and Fenway Park.