National Post (National Edition)
The gender has changed but clichés are the same in Pitch.
PITCH MAY SWITCH THE GENDER ROLES, BUT SHOW KEEPS SPORTS CLICHÉS INTACT
By default, the new Global series Pitch is not your usual baseball drama. Beyond A League of Their Own and The Bad News Bears, there aren’t a lot of stories featuring women or girls actually playing the game, let alone a woman who gets called up to the major leagues.
But when you get beyond the premise — Ginny Baker (Kylie Bunbury), a minor leaguer who throws in the high 80s and has a highly effective screwball, gets called up by the San Diego Padres to make a start — you’ll find that Pitch is a highly conventional sports tale, a fastball down the middle rather than a darting curve.
You’ll also discover that the soap opera beats and sylvan images of the traditional baseball picture are still pretty effective.
Pitch doesn’ t subvert sports clichés, it just adapts them to a new gender.
The hoary fathers-and-sons trope becomes father and daughter, with Ginny assuming the athletic role abdicated by her older brother. We’ve been here before — when her father makes her learn the screwball by throwing nectarines, when her major league catcher gives her a mid-game inspirational speech on the mound, when ownership tells her manager that he can’t send her back down to the minors because it would look bad.
We’ve seen the fatherdaughter dynamic before, too, in the short-lived sitcom Back in the Game and the Clint Eastwood vehicle Trouble With the Curve, but those didn’t show women actually playing.
The pilot, written by the show’s creators, Dan Fogelman and Rick Singer, and directed by Paris Barclay, is glossy and brisk and does about as good a job as you could hope for of putting some life into the baseball formulas. It succeeds only intermittently at that, but it has two other significant advantages.
The show’s close ties to Major League Baseball mean that San Diego’s Petco Park was available for shooting, inside and out, and the locations provide a bracing authenticity. And the show doesn’t get too distracted by sociology and locker-room politics, supplying a sufficient amount of the pure, foolproof imagery and action that are almost always a baseball story’s primary strength. The only real exceptions to that rule being the baseball films directed by Ron Shelton: Bull Durham and Cobb.) When Ginny walks onto the field framed against a sellout crowd, or leaps into the air after a crucial strikeout, the images carry an undeniable, atavistic charge.
Bunbury, previously seen in Twisted and Under the Dome, has reportedly worked hard on her pitching in real life. You couldn’t argue that she has a credible major league delivery on screen, but it’s not so far off that it’s bothersome, and in her carriage and manner she’s a more believable professional athlete than male co-stars like Mark-Paul Gosselaar and Mo McRae.
Bob Balaban, as the team’s owner, and Dan Lauria, as the manager, are steady backup players.
Pitch is clearly in search of an audience beyond sports fans, and there’s a danger that off-field melodrama will outweigh baseball — a late angels-in-the-outfield twist in the pilot is alarming. Like the manager, the producers would be well advised to just let Ginny pitch.