Archived Innings

The television series Pitch aired on Fox in 2016, and I watched it perhaps a year later.  I have been meaning to write about it here ever since, but I think the delay has been largely due to debating how I would approach this thing.  When I watched Ken Burns’s Baseball documentary series, I wrote about it one episode at a time.  However, each episode of that series is approximately two hours long and crammed full of information.  Pitch, meanwhile, is more of a standard television drama.  A separate post for each episode seems excessive.  However, a really long, single, detailed post also seems excessive, so this is going to be quite the Reader’s Digest summary.

The series revolves around a character named Ginny Baker, who becomes the first woman to play Major League Baseball.  In the first episode of the show, Ginny makes her Major League debut with the San Diego Padres.  Though her first start goes terribly, the team opts not to send her back to the minors because they realize that having the first woman Major Leaguer is quite a draw for crowds (it’s always about the money, right?).  Fortunately, Ginny manages to recover from her stumble, and thus, the series takes off.

Ginny’s father, Bill, is the one who not only taught her to pitch, but who also drove her to become good enough to go pro.  We learn early on, however, that Bill actually died years ago in a car accident, right around when Ginny was first drafted by the Padres organization.  His lessons and his death continue to haunt Ginny throughout the series.

Ginny’s relationship with her father is only one of many conflicts throughout the show.  Pitch goes out of its way to try to accurately depict what it would really be like if a woman were to break into the majors.  Ginny deals with an immense amount of pressure in this role, not just through her performance on the diamond, but also in being put up on a pedestal as a role model for girl athletes.  Through all the publicity, Ginny’s primary goal with the team is to be accepted as one of the guys.  We also see drama surrounding the All-Star Game, the trade deadline, the relationships between Ginny and her agent and between Ginny and catcher Mike Lawson, relationships between other players and with their families, and conflicts arising due to Ginny’s brother, Will, trying to capitalize on his sister’s fame.

Once I started watching this series, I was instantly hooked.  I rarely binge-watch anything, but I blew through every episode of Pitch in about two days.  The show does a tremendous job of drawing viewers into the stories surrounding each of the characters, and it throws in enough baseball to give satisfaction to baseball fans.  My only complaint about this show is that it did not get renewed for a second season, leaving so many questions hanging unanswered and the story unfinished.