By Anisha Koilpillai
With the fall upon us, most of our favorite television shows have returned.
Of course, with that comes new series as well. One of the newest series I have started watching is Fox’s Pitch. Pitch is the story of 23-year-old Ginny Baker who becomes the first woman to start in the Major League.
She is an extremely talented pitcher who learned everything she knows from her dad. However, when she pitches for her first game, she only throws 10 balls before asking to be taken out; none of them are great pitches.
Eventually, she overcomes the outside pressure and eventually becomes a successful pitcher in her next game. She pitches through nearly seven innings before being taken out.
In the second episode, we continue to see Ginny’s struggles as she adapts to playing for an all-male team in the pros. Throughout both episodes, we get glimpses of Ginny’s past, all relevant to her becoming the prolific pitcher that she is.
While it is still too early to see if this show will be successful enough to last a few seasons, I’d like to believe it is. The show doesn’t gloss over issues that you would expect to take root in this show; sexism has been one of the major themes in the show.
Ginny’s fight of overcoming sexism has been key to her story and character development. Fitting in to be “one of the guys” is laid bare on the table.
The pressure that Ginny felt to be the first woman to start in an MLB game is the pith of the Pilot episode. And the fact that she didn’t do spectacularly in her first game shows that not everything can be achieved by having the road paved for you.
Another theme that I like about this show is that it casts feminism in a subtle, yet positive light. In both episodes, signs held by girls and young women saying “I’m next” exemplify that Ginny’s success is paramount; it is something inspiring. It is a way of showing that women can do anything a man can do.
This, the notion of having a woman play in an MLB game, even if it is fiction on television, is something that should be inspiring to us as well.
Because it isn’t an easy task as the show has accurately portrayed. It comes with challenges.
It comes with Ginny stating that she never asked for any of this. But it’s the way that this challenge is presented that is appealing to women everywhere.
So yeah, Pitch might not be out of the woods yet. As I write this, we’re only two episodes in.
There are still more challenges to come for Ginny Baker. There will still be opposition to the women’s game in the real world, and even more chaos if a woman ever did play on a “man’s team.”
But if the show is anything to go by, perhaps this will lead to sold-out crowds if such a thing were to happen in the real world. That’s the beauty of television nowadays: it plays on real-world issues to test out innovative ideas.
