The first season of Pitch, a Fox drama imagining the first woman in Major League Baseball, showed some promise. The show was thoughtful and nuanced (if at times a little out of focus), with some occasional soap-opera intrigue to spice things up.
Unfortunately for Fox, the audience never fully materialized. The show, which aired Thursdays at 9 p.m. ET, averaged about three million viewers over 10 episodes, below average for a Fox scripted show. As a result, Pitch is very much on the bubble when it comes to getting renewed for a second season.
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Is The Exorcist coming back? Along with Pitch, Walden said, “Both are very much in the conversation. Not sure. Exorcist actually improved our time period on Friday night by about 35% and it’s an interesting opportunity. It’s never going to be a big ratings winner because of the serialized nature but I thought the show was really good and it was very consistent. Pitch? Bigger conversation.”
She had earlier called it “a great show. It’s a little bit of a tweener. It’s a female-skewing idea, but it’s about baseball and men watch baseball. So we’ve tried and the delayed-viewing is excellent. Now we have to make a tough decision which is in this environment is it possible to grow Pitch to 6 or 7 million viewers on a seven-day metric?”
That doesn’t sound super promising for Pitch. It sounds like Fox is worried the show straddles the line between being a show for women and being a show for baseball fans, who are disproportionately male.
The cast of Pitch seems to be preparing for another season, but it’s not clear at all that Fox is onboard.
