Pitch

When you get beyond the premise--Ginny Baker (Kylie Bunbury), a minor leaguer who throws in the high 80s and has a highly effective screwball, gets called up by the San Diego Padres to make a start--you’ll find that Pitch is a highly conventional sports tale, a fastball down the middle rather than a darting curve. You’ll also discover that the soap opera beats and sylvan images of the traditional baseball picture are still pretty effective.

The dialogue often comes across Aaron Sorkin-lite and the plot mechanics are too familiar to anyone with a decent familiarity to these kind of sports stories. ... The longer the pilot goes on, the stronger it becomes--at least, until its eye-rolling last minute twist--and that’s usually thanks to its outstanding performances, particularly two great turns from Bunbury and Mark-Paul Gosselaar as Mike Lawson.

The heartfelt but sometimes stiff pilot (with unnecessarily jerky camera work) struggles to tell the story of a young black woman breaking into a men’s professional field without turning it into a mini Hallmark movie. And though by the end of the hour we don’t have much of a sense of Ginny, we do get to know star catcher Mike Lawson, played with conceited yet charming aplomb by an almost unrecognizable Gosselaar.

Pitch” does a lot of things right in its first hour, especially in the buildup to her first game. Anyone looking forward to relishing the image of a woman in uniform standing tall on a mound for a professional baseball game should get goosebumps when she does. But those feelings are quickly betrayed by the exaggerated manner in which Baker blows up.