Major League Baseball is coming to FOX this fall, but it won’t just be for the postseason.
The network ordered a show called “Pitch” to series Tuesday, and it’s a drama about the first female player in MLB. The show follows Ginny, played by Kylie Bunbury, who breaks into the big leagues as a pitcher for the San Diego Padres.
And best of all, the league is involved in the whole series.
“(I)t felt very important to us that it be with Major League Baseball,” writer and executive producer Dan Fogelman told The Hollywood Reporter on Wednesday. “I didn’t want to do fictional baseball teams and uniforms and that sort of thing. I was very hopeful because it’s such a natural fit between FOX and MLB.”
MLB wants everything to be as realistic as possible, so the writing and production crew at “Pitch” is getting help from former pitchers C.J. Nitkowski and Gregg Olson, and the actors are working with a real major league trainer in Alan Jaeger. Not to mention, Bunbury has been working on her pitching four to six days a week at 60 feet, six inches, the actual distance from a major league pitcher’s mound to home plate.
“She has an arsenal of filthy stuff,” Fogelman told THR. “In making sure that everything feels accurate and believable, there are limitations of body type, and it will be very hard and challenging for a woman to be throwing 100 mph.
“In the story, she has a very hard-driving father who has groomed her from birth to be the first woman to make it in MLB and at a certain point in her adolescence levels with her (and says), ‘You’re never going to have the arm strength of the boys you’re competing with, so we’re going to give you some secret weapons, and you’ll start training from the time you’re 12 years old.’ So she has these arsenal pitches but primarily a screwball, which is a pitch that’s not used that much anymore.”
And, we might even see some real-life major leaguers.
“In the pilot, there’s a couple of games where we play the (Los Angeles) Dodgers and the San Francisco Giants,” Fogelman said. “We want to be able to utilize cameos. Nothing would make me happier than Ginny facing Mike Trout down the road in an episode.”
Thumbnail photo via Instagram/kyliebunbury
