George Bassett mentions several real-life baseball players, including Luke Easter whom he correctly identifies as having played for San Diego in 1949. (At the time, San Diego was the minor league affiliate of the Cleveland Indians.) Easter was murdered two months after this episode aired.
Guest actor Richard Kelton, who plays Norman Wheeler, died of an accidental carbon monoxide poisoning in his trailer while working on the NBC mini-series Centennial, on November 27, 1978, nearly two months before the airing of this segment on January 25, 1979.
Sharon Spelman, who appears in this episode as George Bassett (Mills Watson)'s public defender, Karen Hathaway, has appeared before in the series. In the 2-parter, Profit and Loss, her character, Doris Parker, was very similar. In that one, she was a widow, who believes her husband had been murdered by Fiscal Dynamics, whereas in this one, she's a public defender, who believes her client is wrongly accused of murder. In both cases, she urges Rockford to take the case, in spite of many threats to him.