Pitching baseball-themed TV shows to Hollywood
When FOX announced earlier this month that it will air the pilot episode of "Pitch" - an hour-long drama about the first woman to play in the majors - it got us thinking: How come there aren't more baseball-related shows on TV?
American League MVP Josh Donaldson just finished filming scenes for the upcoming season of "Vikings" on the History channel, and former minor leaguer Josh Murray appeared on the 2014 season of "The Bachelor," but as far as baseball shows go, there hasn't been one on TV since "Eastbound & Down" ended in 2013. Let's change that.
Here are three pitches for fictional baseball-themed TV shows we'd love for Hollywood to consider:
The Commish
Stars: Kevin Spacey as Rob Manfred
Genre: Drama
Borrowing the title of the mid-90s legal sitcom of the same name, "The Commish" chronicles the tyranny of baseball's newest commissioner and his undying efforts to radically improve offense and make the sport more profitable. Each episode begins with Spacey introducing a significant change (banning shifts, adding sponsors to uniforms, expanding the number of strikes each batter gets from three to four), and explores the tensions it causes between the league, union, and its fans. This one-hour drama includes mostly standalone episodes that get resolved each week, though it also follows the general storyline of the BBWAA's quest to raise awareness of Spacey's actions, and preserve what they deem to be the integrity of the game.
Men in Black: Diamond Warfare
Stars: Mike Starr as Joe West, Steven Bauer as Angel Hernandez
Genre: Sci-Fi Comedy
Fans of "Ray Donovan" and "Dumb and Dumber" will love this baseball-inspired reboot of "Men in Black," which features Starr and Bauer as two bumbling, alien-fighting secret agents sent by the government to expose an extraterrestrial scandal on the diamond. Working under the guise of being major-league umpires, their mission is to infiltrate clubhouses and track down the baseball-playing aliens, a group believed to include Mike Trout, Aaron Harang, and Munenori Kawasaki. As the blown calls add up and the criticism mounts, how far will these impostor umpires go in their efforts to reveal the truth?
The Sabermetrician
Stars: Hosted by Tom Verducci
Genre: Reality
Twenty-four saber-minded candidates compete for an analytics position in MLB in this Bachelor-meets-baseball reality show hosted by star baseball writer Tom Verducci. Each week, contestants will participate in group challenges designed to weed out the weakest competitors. Tasks include using advanced analysis to reveal market inefficiencies, calculating park- and league-adjusted stat lines during games in real-time, and improving the predictability of defensive statistics by creating a new metric. Drama ensues in the Moneyball mansion midway through the season when producers introduce a new candidate whose analysis is rooted in traditional stats like RBIs, pitcher wins, and batting average. The war on statistics has never been so real.