in ENTERTAINMENT

The Real Problem with Pitch Part 1

Pitch's issues weren't drama related.

Every year when we reach the cancel/renew portion of the television network schedule, I always lose a friend. It never fails, mainly because I have oddball tastes. Usually the fact I legitimately like it, like No Tomorrow, Making History or Frequency means it’s doomed from the start. I’ve come to expect it, so I do feel empathy for fans of the show, Pitch.

But Pitch was doomed from the start and it had nothing at all do whether I watched it or not (I didn’t). It’s days were numbered because it was a drama built around baseball that got all of the baseball wrong.

I could be accused of kicking a horse while it’s down, but in my defense, the NFL Draft and NCAA Softball and Baseball Tournaments overlapped and nearly ended me. With that over, we’ve hit a good dead time in the NFL (which is why the NFL Network programs its Top 100 here), Lisa Iannucci already put together a strong defense of the show, based on it’s characters and drama. For viewers like me, I never got that far to care because the actual business and sport of baseball was so wrong from the start, I didn’t make it 10 minutes into the pilot.

Of all the sports, baseball is the easiest to translate to TV and film. It’s got a slow enough pace that it’s easy to fake on camera and as long as you can teach an actor or actress the proper stances and throwing techniques, you’ll get away with a lot. They can fake a solid game on film, but what you can’t fake is a knowledge of how the sport actually works.

Pitch was about the fictional major league baseball journey of Genevieve “Ginny” Baker played by Kylie Bunbury. Baker is 23 years old and has spent five years in the San Diego Padres minor league system and right there we’ve already messed up the baseball.

See, Ginny’s skill as a pitcher is her mastery of the different pitches, specifically the “screwball.” She has no real power and her fastball tops out in the high 80s, the show says. In the parlance of baseball, that means she throws trash. She’s a ground ball pitcher with the fastball of a high school sophomore. She’s also right-handed. That’s important.

Ginny’s height and weight are never given as far as I can tell, but Bunbury is 5-8 and 128, so that’s what Ginny has to be. They certainly make no effort to make her appear taller or larger.

So what the show is saying is that a 5-8, 128-pound trashcan pitcher was drafted right out of high school at 18. Seriously?

Now, a lot of guys do get drafted out of high school. There are a shitload of rounds to an MLB draft and teams toss picks all over, but most guys with major league talent, if they don’t go in the first couple of rounds, go on to college. Hell, otherwise college baseball couldn’t even exist.

There are 40 rounds in the MLB draft and no one, regardless of their genital situation, is getting drafted with those skills. To prove it, I’ll just point at the actual 2016 MLB draft that saw 11 pitchers taken in that final round.

Meet Nick Bennett, freshman southpaw pitcher for the University of Louisville. He was drafted with the No. 1,025th pick in the 40th round by the San Francisco Giants last spring out of Moeller High School in Cincinnati, Ohio. At the time he was 6-4, 219 pounds and threw in the low 90s. He decided to go to college and raise his draft stock from the next to last pick of the 2016 draft. Hopefully it all works out for him, but you should now see the issue with Ginny getting drafted at all.

This guy, Bennett, was the final pitcher taken in a draft that saw 1,026 players picked and he already, as an 18 year old, has more physical tools than Ginny as presented on the show. And the thing is, this is where Ginny is today, an array of pitches and a high 80s fastball. That’s after five years of professional coaching.

https://twitter.com/obriensarmy/status/866025978623123458

A pro scout once told me they can get a guy’s velocity up 3 or 4 mph in the pros, through technique, gym work and nutrition. That means Ginny, at 18, probably hit 85 on a good day with the wind at her back.

Does that mean a pitcher like Ginny would have no chance in pro ball? Not at all, but the road there would be very different. Ginny, with her solid quiver of pitches, could have earned a scholarship at an NCAA Division II or JuCo. It already happened once in real life. Sarah Hudek got a pitching scholarship at a JuCo, Bossier State Community College.

Like Ginny, Hudek was trained from a young age by her dad, former MLB pitcher John Hudek, and, at 18, had a nice selection of pitches and topped out her fastball at 82 mph. She earned that scholarship and was a bullpen pitcher her freshman year, appearing in 13 games, finishing 2-1 with a 4.95 ERA and 12 strikeouts.

But it’s not just the basics of Ginny’s rise through the minors that Pitch completely shits on.  It’s the locker room too. Again, all it would take to know this is just a basic knowledge of the sport. When the owner of the Padres tells Ginny here teammates are excited to meet her, she says, “No they’re not.”

The implication there is they don’t want a woman on the team and blah blah blah, but the real reason, if the writers of this show had Googled the word “baseball,” is most of them would have met Ginny before. Years before.

She’s been in the minor leagues for five seasons. That means a year in rookie ball, at least, and she was just called up from the Padres Triple-A team to get this start (and we’ll talk about “starting” later). Just doing basic math that means she shot through Low-A, High-A and Double-A in three seasons. And only one of the guys on the 25-man roster played with her the whole time? Blip Sanders who played with her in Double-A San Antonio “three years ago.” Oh yeah, that’s right. The show is telling you she was in Double-A ball when she was 20.

I’m not done, here, with this show. Not by a long shot, but this is where I wrapped up my first viewing. It was too much crazy for me to waste another minute on. But I’m about to work my way through the entire pilot just for you.

To be continued….

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Written by Adam Greene

Adam Greene is a writer and photographer based out of East Tennessee. His work has appeared on Cracked.com, in USA Today, the Associated Press, the Chicago Cubs Vineline Magazine, AskMen.com and many other publications.

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