‘Pitch’ Co-Creator Rick Singer Explains How The Baseball Drama Is A 21st-Century Sports Story

The new FOX series Pitch is about a baseball team the way Empire is about a record label or UnReal is about a reality TV show. It’s about a core group of talented, strong-willed people navigating high-stress jobs in a highly competitive environment and about how they react to a talented, strong-willed woman shocking a male-dominated world.

The story centers around Ginny Baker — played by newcomer Kylie Bunbury — as the first woman to play Major League Baseball, and her presence in the San Diego Padres dugout causes some of the same ripples that Jackie Robinson made nearly 70 years ago as the first black player in the majors. Do women belong in Major League Baseball? Even if the answer is yes in theory, does Ginny Baker belong?

Pitch became a critical hit — and one of Decider’s five new network shows you should be watching — by chasing answers to those questions and broadening out the story to her agent (Ali Larter), teammate (Mark-Paul Gosselaar), manager (Dan Lauria), GM (Mark Consuelos) and team owner (Bob Balaban). We caught up with Pitch co-creator Rick Singer to talk about the new series, which airs Thursday nights on FOX and the next day on the FOXNOW app and Hulu.

DECIDER: Pilots are hard to get right because you have so many things to set up, but second episodes hard too because you have to carve down to what the show is going to be about. Is that your take, or do you think second episodes are a little easier?

Singer: In our case, I think the second episode was equally difficult. The pilot was really an origin story that explained how Ginny Baker [played by Kylie Bunbury] got to the major leagues, but the end of the pilot with she and her father raised some questions about what the series was going to be about. The second episode was another pilot to an extent in establishing what the series was going to be going forward. Ginny getting to the majors was not an ending but very much a beginning to her story.

Are you approaching the backstories as their own parallel story, or will those be more like short stories that support the particular episodes?

We’re using the flashback technique as a means to reveal our characters. It’s a great device as a storytelling technique and gives us a means to understand the characters in a way we wouldn’t otherwise be able to. In the second episode, we get into how how Amelia Slater (Ali Larter) came to be Ginny’s agent and about Mike Lawson (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) going through a divorce. We get to see the vulnerability of these characters that have a tough facade. They’re integrated thematically into what’s happening in the episode, and we see them as a unique opportunity to reveal more about the things that are happening in the present day.

So you’ll be about to bounce around to different points in Ginny’s life and other characters’ lives as the show goes on.

Oh, absolutely. We’ll continue to go back to different points in Ginny’s life and expand that to the other characters over the course of the series.

How did you cast Kylie Bunbury as the lead? How important was a sports background?

We approached it from all levels. We looked at actresses who would be believable as athletes, and we also looked at athletes with baseball or softball experience. We weren’t going to do the series unless we found someone that people would believe as a Major League pitcher, and Kylie Bunbury came in as a great actress with an athletic background. Her father [Canadian Hall of Famer Alex Bunbury] was a professional soccer player and her brother [Teal Bunbury of MLS’s New England Revolution] is a professional soccer player. She’s a natural athlete and she understands athletes. She walks into the room with a swagger that’s more athlete than actress. She was about three sentences into the audition when we knew she was the one.

I watched the pilot knowing who was in the series and kept looking for Mark-Paul Gosselaar and thought maybe he was going to come on in the second or third episode.

[Laughs.]

I was stunned when I looked in the notes and saw that he was playing Mike Lawson, the catcher.

It’s a remarkable reinvention. After Mark-Paul auditioned for the part, [co-creator] Dan Fogelman said, “You know, with 20 more pounds on you and a huge catcher beard, I think that would reinvent you.” And he was absolutely right. I’ve heard the comment time and time again that people don’t recognize him, and it’s a perfect role for him. He’s the team captain. He’s a Hall of Famer and the face of the franchise who’s been there for 15 years, and he’s facing his baseball mortality for the first time.

I like Dan Lauria, who a lot of people will recognize from The Wonder Years, as the manager. This may be the most Dan Lauria part that Dan Lauria has ever played.

[Laughs.] I have loved him in other stuff he’s done, but he was born to play this part. Pilots, as you say, are difficult. You’re establishing the archetype, he’s another character with a rough facade. We recognize the opportunity to explore his humanity, and in the second episode he becomes the center of controversy for some sexist comments he had made several years ago, and he has this fabulous scene where he apologizes to Ginny and talks about having daughters. You can see what a loving, caring father he is, and he’s clearly taking on a paternal role with Ginny.

Have you talked a lot about sports movies in the writers’ room, or have you tried to avoid that?

There are a bunch of books we wanted everyone to read and documentaries to watch to have a common language we could all refer to, but we understand too that this is a unique story by the fact that she’s a woman and in a media age that makes it a very modern story.

When you shoot on a stage, you’ve got a lot of latitude to build new sets and adapt as you figure out the story. How did you navigate that when you’re shooting in a baseball stadium with large crowds. Will that be a big factor going forward?

We shot the pilot in San Diego in the clubhouse and on the field at Petco Park. Once we got picked up to series, we recreated the clubhouse, the trainers’ rooms, Ginny’s hotel room, etc., on the Paramount lot. So we’re mostly shooting there and then going to San Diego four or five days a month to shoot the baseball scenes and the location scenes in San Diego.

The show is about a black female athlete playing Major League Baseball, so it comes preloaded with a representation story and a fish-out-of-water story. Are you having a lot of discussions about how much to do those stories or not do them or do them without looking like you’re doing them?

We’re all big fans of the sports underdog story. She’s 23 years old, she becomes the most famous woman in the country overnight, and she faces all of the pressures that come with that. It’s an inspiration story, and it’s a timely, natural, untold, unpacked story. It’s hard enough to be a Major League player — to make a team, to hold on to your job — and on some level Ginny’s goals are to be just another player and not be separated from the rest of the team, which is impossible because of who she is and her celebrity status and what she represents.

[Where to Stream Pitch]