Chuck Rhoades (Paul Giamatti) says to Bobby Axlerod, "There's a saying in baseball: towns fire managers. Owners just give them the bad news." Paul Giamatti's father, Angelo Bartlett "Bart" Giamatti, was commissioner of Major League Baseball from April 1989 until his death in September 1989. Although his tenure as commissioner was brief, he was commissioner during the most famous dismissal of a manager in baseball history: the decision to render Pete Rose as "permanently ineligible" from baseball because he was found to have bet on Major League games. In 2018, Paul Giamatti told the New York Times that, unlike his father, he actually doesn't care that much about baseball: "I'm not a big sports fan, but I like sports movies."
Maggie Siff who plays Wendy Rhoades, starred in Sons of Anarchy (2008) as Tara Knowles Teller, her husband from Season 5 onward had an ex-wife named Wendy.