Review: 'Pitch' bunts with tale of female big-league player

Same old pitch, with some welcome new curves.

Apparently there are only so many ways to tell a sports story, and Fox's Pitch (Thursday, 9 ET/PT, ** 1/2 out of four) borrows from most of them. There’s the much-hyped rookie star threatening to buckle under the pressure of excess expectations. There’s the father who has poured all of his own shattered hopes and dreams into the rookie’s success. There’s the grizzled veteran, uncertain whether he wants to serve as mentor or destroyer. There are supportive teammates, resentful teammates, clamoring fans, greedy executives — and a potential forbidden love, just to keep things interesting.

Then, luckily, there's the one big thing that sets Pitch apart: This particular rookie, Ginny Baker (Kylie Bunbury), is an African-American woman fighting to become the first female to play Major League Baseball. And that alone is enough to make this a pitch worth catching, at least for awhile.

When it comes to rookies who deserve a shot at the big time, Pitch has certainly found a fine one in Bunbury. You can immediately see why Ginny’s agent (Ali Larter) and the team’s press rep (Mark Consuelos) would latch on to her, and why little girls in the stands would root for her: Bunbury exudes star power, strength and integrity. As for her pitching motion, baseball experts will have to tell you whether it holds up under close scrutiny; for the rest of us, it seems more than good enough to avoid being a distraction.

Produced by Dan Fogelman (NBC’s appealing This is Us) and Rick Singer, Pitch is yet another show that bounces through time, simultaneously showing us where Ginny is and how she got there. That means lots  of flashbacks with her father (Michael Beach), who relentlessly pushes her to succeed.

She's almost made it, but she's not there yet. She has to get past her own anxiety while shouldering the weight society has placed upon her. And she has to win over her teammates, led by the team’s captain (Mark-Paul Gosselaar, hiding behind a lot of hair), who thinks “she’s a gimmick. She’s the dwarf that played for the St Louis Browns.”

With some fine performances and a good sense for the frenzy Ginny might cause, Pitch is, all told, an entertaining hour — and one that should please Major League Baseball, which is cooperating in the production. But it’s also one, if you can forgive yet another baseball metaphor, that leaves the show with two strikes.

The first is that Pitch is virtually surprise-free, save for a twist that feels more like a gimmick, and a dead-end one at that. The other is that while the writers no doubt have more stories to tell, you can't help wondering whether they've already told the most interesting one. They'd get a third strike in baseball; in TV, two strikes can be enough.

Play ball and we'll see.