The Willie Mays baseball card is from the 1951 Bowman Baseball set, with a value of $4,000 as of 2014.
Jake quotes Captain Picard from Star Trek: First Contact (1996) when he says "we work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity." Ronald D. Moore (who worked on this episode as well as First Contact) commented, "I take great glee at mocking my own work."
Some events from Rapture (1996) are referenced - specifically, Sisko's insistence that Bajor should not join the Federation yet. According to Kai Winn, it has been six months since the events of "Rapture".
The layout of the A-story, Jake and Nog trying to buy a baseball card but continually being forced to get something in lieu of the card, is similar in design to the B-story of Progress (1993), where they are trying to earn latinum, but keep on ending up with commodities rather than profit. Nog continues this tradition on his own in Treachery, Faith and the Great River (1998), where he describes this process to Chief O'Brien as sailing the river of the Great Material Continuum.