http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/22/arts/television/review-pitch-a-gender-changeup-but-with-cliches-intact.html 2016-09-22 00:30:56 Review: ‘Pitch,’ a Gender Changeup, but With Clichés Intact Kylie Bunbury stars in this baseball drama as a female pitcher who gets called up to the major leagues. It starts on Fox on Thursday. === By default, the new But 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. “Pitch,” which makes its premiere on Thursday, doesn’t subvert sports clichés, it just adapts them to a new gender. The hoary fathers-and-sons trope becomes father and daughter, with Ginny assuming the athletic role abdicated by her older brother. We’ve been here before — when her father makes her learn the screwball by throwing nectarines, when her major league catcher gives her a midgame inspirational speech on the mound, when ownership tells her manager that he can’t send her back down to the minors because it would look bad. (We’ve seen the father-daughter dynamic before, too, in the short-lived sitcom “Back in the Game” and the Clint Eastwood vehicle “Trouble With the Curve,” but those didn’t show women actually playing.) The pilot (and only episode available for review), written by the show’s creators, Dan Fogelman and Rick Singer, and directed by Paris Barclay, is glossy and brisk and does about as good a job as you could hope for of putting some life into the baseball formulas. It succeeds only intermittently at that, but it has two other significant advantages. The show’s close ties to Major League Baseball mean that San Diego’s Petco Park was available for shooting, inside and out, and the locations provide a bracing authenticity. And the pilot doesn’t get too distracted by sociology and locker-room politics, supplying a sufficient amount of the pure, foolproof imagery and action that are almost always a baseball story’s primary strength. (The only real exceptions to that rule being the baseball films directed by Ron Shelton, Ms. Bunbury, previously seen in “Twisted” and “Under the Dome,” has “Pitch” is clearly in search of an audience beyond sports fans, and there’s a danger that off-field melodrama will outweigh baseball — a late angels-in-the-outfield twist in the pilot is alarming. Like the manager, the producers would be well advised to just let Ginny pitch.