Dear Hulu: Stop Teasing a ‘Pitch’ Revival and Just Do It

Last week, Hulu posted a brand new advertisement for Pitch, one of its more recent library acquisitions. The 2016 sports drama ran for just 10 episodes on Fox, but it hooked an ardent core audience with its insiders look at baseball, soapy romances, and dramatic twists. (It was, after all, created by This is Us mastermind Dan Fogelman.) But what was unusual about this ad was that it was clearly shot in quarantine and that it teased a major renewal. The short clip, now streamed over 100,000 times by Pitch fans, could be nothing or it could be a sign that Hulu is all in on renewing Pitch.

And you know what? Hulu should reboot Pitch. It was a show that was both incredibly ahead of its time and still behind where we are now. Pitch would undoubtedly have newfound resonance in the aftermath of both the 2016 election and the #MeToo movement. More importantly, its very concept — following a Black pitcher who is the first woman to ever play in one of the big four professional sports leagues — would take on an even deeper meaning in a time where we are lamenting the loss of sports and fighting for Black lives and culture.

Pitch imagines a world where Kylie Bunbury’s Ginny Baker became the first woman to compete with men at a professional level in 2016. In the opening moments, her hotel room is overflowing with flower arrangements and well wishes from the likes of Ellen DeGeneres and Hillary Clinton. (An already almost dated pair of impressive fans?) On her way to the Petco Stadium for her first game pitching with the San Diego Padres, she’s besieged by sports commentators doubting her ability and little girls hoisting signs pledging that they’re next. However, as soon as she arrives in the clubhouse, she is confronted with jealousy, skepticism, and good old fashioned sexism. It’s actually astonishing how things that may have played as funny or benign in 2016 now reek of horror in 2020.

Ginny, understandably, whiffs her first game and becomes a national laughing stock. However, after Minor League pal Blip Sanders (Mo McRae) pleads her case to the team’s star catcher Mike Lawson (Mark-Paul Gosselaar), the veteran steps in with a nerve-calming pep talk in her sophomore step up. Ginny becomes an instant success for the team, but her popularity threatens to drive a wedge in team morale, and her presence forces rampant misogyny to the surface.

But that’s not the only drama in Pitch. Ginny also has to contend with grief over the sudden loss of her demanding father years prior, the return of a former flame who is now a catcher on a rival team, and the demands of her agent, Amelia (Ali Larter). In the midst of this, we see behind-the-scenes political maneuvering, sports rivalries, and a musical chairs-like romantic soap opera where characters exchange meaningful glances as much as they swap spit. And yet Pitch also finds time to be funny. It’s a comforting show that switches up genres as easily as, well, a pitcher plays with their pitches.

Hulu’s interest in Pitch comes at a moment where the series might have a much better chance at success than it initially did. Watching the series now, early episodes seem laden with a sort of reverent feminist message that fit in with a culture anticipating the imminent election of its first female president. Ironically, it’s as if the show thought Ginny Baker’s pro baseball career was way more attainable than a tampering down of sexism in the workplace. What 2016 actually delivered to us, and Pitch, was a curveball of its own. In the years since Hillary Clinton’s electoral defeat, women haven’t conquered major league sports, but they have made meaningful change in the workplace. The Ginny Baker of 2020 would have more power in her professional life, even if sports itself has temporarily lost its luster.

Of course, Pitch is a show about sports. It’s deeply rooted in the world of managers jockeying for credit, bullpen politics, and the Möbius strip of feedback between the sports news pundits and locker room realities. While sports struggles to find its footing in a post-COVID world, Pitch could fill that baseball void. More intriguingly, it could dramatize a world where Ginny Baker has not only stood on the Padres mound for four years, but maybe COVID didn’t ruin baseball? (Maybe??) No matter how the Pitch revival would be approached, the series undoubtedly would have way more to say about women, race, sexism, and sports today than it did then.

In any event, Hulu’s self-produced socially-distant commercial for Pitch teases that Lawson and Baker and their pals might not be done with drama in the baseball diamond. At the very least, Kylie Bunbury and Mark-Paul Gosselaar seem up for some more ping-pong-ing banter. And Pitch fans are here for it, too.

Where to stream Pitch