wait but actually…sisko’s baseball is his orb??? he leaves it behind as a relic and a reminder of his return, as is common for prophets and messianic figures? it’s baseball that he uses to try and explain human time to the prophets? it never leaves his desk, and its presence haunts dukat when the cardassians briefly recapture the station?? pls tell me if this is something people have talked about because the baseball as a religious relic/object/orb is blowing my mind
the fact that he explains baseball to the prophets in the first episode really adds to the baseball’s religious significance. when he used it to describe linear existence to non-linear gods they asked “you value your ignorance of what is to come?” and he said “that may be the most important thing to understand about humans. it is the unknown that defines our existence. we are constantly searching, not just for answers to our questions, but for new questions. we are explorers. we explore our lives, day by day, and we explore the galaxy, trying to expand the boundaries of our knowledge. and that is why i am here. not to conquer you either with weapons or with ideas, but to co-exist and learn”
which is basically the moral code that sisko lives by, his religion. searching for the unknown, answering questions, co-existing and learning are the things that sisko tries to do throughout the series, though that gets super fucking difficult for him. and when shit gets rough, he ponders his orb
