The best sports dramas, especially the best ones on television, understand that the people playing the sport are much more important than the games themselves. Friday Night Lights wasn’t nominated for Outstanding Drama at the Emmys multiple times because it portrayed exciting, realistic football games; it was one of the greatest shows on television for years because of how well it crafted its characters and the situations in which they found themselves. While it’s still far too early to compare Pitch to something of the caliber of Friday Night Lights, the series premiere of the new FOX drama shows quite a bit of promise. Even though it boasts the FOX Sports and MLB Network logos and features cameos from the likes of Joe Buck and John Smoltz as the games’ broadcast announcers, Pitch never loses focus on what’s most important about the show: its protagonist, Ginny Baker (Kylie Bunbury).
By becoming the first woman to play in the MLB (as a starting pitcher for the San Diego Padres), Ginny faces an overwhelming amount of pressure. She’s an instant role model for young girls and the African-American community, as she gets compared to everyone from Hillary Clinton to Jackie Robinson (the Padres even give her the jersey number 43 because it’s “one up from Jackie”), and while she understands the significance of her pitching in the majors and values the platform she’s been given, it also distracts her from focusing on the exact reason why she began playing baseball in the first place. She needs to realize that she can’t go out on the mound and try to win for every single girl that’s calling out her name in the stands, or in order to prove all of her critics in the sports media wrong. As Mark-Paul Gosselaar’s star catcher, Mike Lawson, tells her near the end of the pilot, she needs to pitch for herself and for her team; they’re all that matters.
It’s Mike’s words that finally get through to Ginny at the beginning of her second start, but we also see through flashbacks interspersed throughout the pilot that his advice represents the same mentality that Ginny’s father, Bill (Michael Beach), always had. That hunger to win, the thirst to prove herself, has been embedded in Ginny since a young age, and her dad’s words continue to echo inside her head, as she remembers how he always told her that “We ain’t done nothing yet,” even after she accomplished so much. Ginny’s competitive nature (along with a wicked screwball) is what helped her achieve her goals of becoming a Major League Baseball player, and the main story in Pitch‘s premiere is about how she struggles to confront her past with her father and access that fierce determination on the biggest stage yet of her career.
Of course, while Pitch does a lot of things well with Ginny’s relationship with her father, it also uses his death as the premiere’s most predictable twist. I can understand the creators’ intention here with keeping Bill’s tragic death a secret for much of the pilot’s running time, but the execution of the “twist” at the end is more clumsy than effective. It feels like an inevitable conclusion rather than a surprising and emotional turn.
Furthermore, while Pitch does a fantastic job of establishing Ginny, Mike, and even Blip as characters, it fails to make Ali Larter’s Amelia more than the stereotypical “tough agent,” or provide Mark Consuelos’ GM with a defining characteristic other than “wants to sleep with Amelia.” While this is understandable for a series premiere (very few shows have all their characters clearly defined by the end of their first hours), I’m hoping to see more development and complexity for Pitch‘s supporting players in future episodes.
Overall, though, Pitch offers viewers an incredibly strong pilot episode, one featuring strong performances (especially from Bunbury, Beach, and Gosselaar) and terrific direction from Paris Barclay (who has helmed a variety of shows, from Sons of Anarchy to Glee, and is one of the best in the business). There’s a lot to admire and appreciate about this series premiere, but what has me most excited about Pitch is the potential the show has. “Pilot” is a solid opening hour, but I could see this series, at some point, reaching the heights of television’s best sports dramas. Pitch is already a home run, but I can envision it reaching grand slam levels before Season 1 is over. (Come on, you know I had to throw at least one baseball pun into this review.)
What did you think of Pitch? Did you enjoy it as much as I did? Comment below and let me know.
[Photo credit: Tommy Garcia/FOX]
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