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This Week in 'Pitch': The trade deadline is a cruel mistress
Welcome back to our weekly coverage of “Pitch.” The show is back from its break just in time for the World Series, but in the world of “Pitch,” they’ve just hit the trade deadline. Who will be traded? Who will stay in San Diego? Read on to find out.
Caution: The following article contains spoilers for season 1, episode 5 of “Pitch,” as well as the previous four episodes.
ON THE FIELD
Most of this episode’s action is related to the trade deadline, which is just two days away. Ginny is not taking it well, and this episode confirms my greatest fears about her: Ginny might be the least interesting character on the show. That’s quite an accomplishment considering she’s the first female pitcher in the majors. Ginny spends the entire episode worried about the trade deadline like it’s something she’s never heard of before. “What if my teammates get traded? What if my only friend gets traded?” are questions she actually asks. Even as a minor leaguer she would have experienced prospects being traded to other teams, so it’s ludicrous that she’s confused by this.
Of course, she’s really worried about Blip Sanders being traded, since he and his wife are her only friends in San Diego. (And possibly her only friends, period.) Blip can’t handle Ginny’s worries about losing her only friends, since he’s concerned about having to, you know, uproot his entire life and tear his kids away from the only home they’ve ever known. It sucks, but that’s baseball. Ginny confides in her agent, Amelia, about how worried she is that she might lose Blip, and the advice Amelia gives betrays how little she knows about baseball.
Amelia tells Ginny to use her leverage as the most famous person in baseball to get what she wants. So she marches into the Oscar the GM’s office to tell him that she doesn’t want Blip to be traded. This is just so wrong on so many levels that I cannot believe that Ginny would have thought it was a good idea. She may be new to the majors, but she’s spent time in the minors, and so in real life she would understand that baseball is a business and this is just how it’s done. You don’t become a baseball player without accepting the reality that you could be traded at any time. I am not on board with the writers and producers of this show lessening Ginny’s baseball IQ (not to mention her toughness) to wring out more drama. Bring back Awesome Ginny from the pilot!
In other trade deadline happenings, owner Frank Reid has been replaced by a new president of baseball operations. He’s young, and just moved to San Diego to Palo Alto. He presents Oscar with a challenging/impossible set of tasks: acquire the pieces they need to contend without giving up any of their top prospects, and shave $2 million off the payroll. So, those two things are pretty much diametrically opposed, and it’s hard to tell what this new guy is really trying to do. Regardless, Oscar actually manages to do all of that without trading Blip, but there’s an unforeseen consequence for Ginny. Tommy, the pitcher who started out hating her before they bonded and became friends, has been traded to the Cubs.
OFF THE FIELD
With most of the story related to the trade deadline, there isn’t much to cover here. Mike Lawson and Amelia are still sleeping together, and after a tryst one evening they walk out to her car and find that both of her side mirrors have been smashed. Mike calls it “groupie-on-groupie crime,” which he discovers was the 100% wrong thing to say to an intelligent, adult, self-possessed woman who is in no way a groupie. She storms off, and the next day Mike tries to make amends by having a loaner car delivered from one of his auto dealerships. Amelia also doesn’t like this, and lays down the law with a pretty great line: “Don’t apologize for calling me a groupie by treating me like one.”
The fight doesn’t last long, though, and at the end of it they both decide to finally tell Ginny. Amelia gets to her first, and Ginny seems to take it well. But when Mike calls Ginny seconds later to presumably tell her the news, she sends him to voicemail. Uh oh.
IN THE PAST
This one’s a doozy. The trade deadline and losing friends is bringing up a lot of feelings for Ginny. We flash back to high school, and a friend she made named Jordan, who plays second base on her team. It almost seems like Ginny has never had a friend before, and her dad isn’t quite sure what to do. Jordan’s dad never comes to their games, and that’s because he’s an alcoholic. (If you didn’t see where this storyline was going here, don’t feel bad — I didn’t either.)
Despite his domineering single-mindedness, Ginny’s dad, Bill, is a good guy. When Jordan’s dad doesn’t show up for their big game, he calls him midway through to remind him to come. Jordan’s dad eventually wakes up from his drunken stupor and hears the message, so he grabs his keys and races off to the game. It’s not clear at this point if he’s still drunk, but he’s so desperate to get to the game that he runs a red light and hits another car dead-on.
The car he hit? Yeah, it was the car that Bill and Ginny were in. As we saw in the first episode of the series, Bill was thrown from the car and died, while Ginny lived. Jordan’s dad also survived unscathed, and he and his son move away soon after. One way or another, Ginny has trouble keeping friends.
BEHIND THE SCENES
Kylie Bunbury, who plays Ginny, has trained a lot for this role, beyond what most actresses have to go through to get ready for a role. Of course, most actresses don’t get to play the first female baseball player in Major League Baseball. Given all the actual pitching she does, her arm needs rest just like any other pitcher, and you can see her talk about that in the video at the top of this article.
MIKE LAWSON VS ZACK MORRIS
This week, Mike and Zack are pretty even. Mike screws up his relationship with Amelia, just like Zack did with Kelly Kapowski so very many times in “Saved by the Bell.” Mike fixed it by buying Amelia a night guard so she could sleep over at his place without having to rush home. When Zack screwed up by not listening to what Kelly wanted, he put on a play where Screech played Kelly. It was… weird. (Very weird.) There are no clips for this episode online, but it’s season 2 episode 17 (“Breaking Up is Hard to Undo”). Here’s a delightful little gif.
I don’t think it would have worked if Mike had put on a weird little play for Amelia, but the show is only five episodes old. There’s still time!
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Liz Roscher is a writer for Big League Stew on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email her at lizroscher@yahoo.com or follow her on twitter! Follow @lizroscher
