The trade deadline made the Padres a little crazy, and stirred up more bad memories for Ginny on Pitch 1×05.
“Alphonso Guzman-Chavez” goes full tilt on Pitch‘s unique blend of baseball reality and sting-your-eyes, sudsy drama. The episode takes place in the the tension-soaked hours before the MLB trade deadline, and though I’m not a ball player, I suspect that the yearly human chess game probably involves a few less existential crises in real life.
Still, the tension generated by Oscar’s vow to make the Padres contenders provides a solid goad throughout the episode. Oscar himself is under a personal wire, as Charlie Graham, the freshly-minted President of Baseball Operations wants him to cut the team budget in addition to putting the Padres in the playoff hunt.
Oscar wheels and deals across the Majors like a kid trading very expensive baseball cards, fighting off debilitating toothaches and that awkward moment when you leave your team without a third baseman.
Meanwhile, the Padres twist in San Diego’s sweet summer wind. Ginny finds the situation uniquely harrowing, as she is terrified to lose Blip as a teammate. It’s a bit of a childish performance on Ginny’s part, and Pitch 1×05 strains a bit around the edges of her discomfort with a normal part of her chosen profession.
But the episode also patches those edges, even as Ginny’s anxiety leaks out into Blip’s life and causes tension between them. Throughout Pitch‘s brief run, Ginny never seems more at ease than she does while playing “Aunt Ginny” to Blip’s family. She doesn’t just love these people — she clearly finds in them a kind of stability that has long been absent from her own life.
The flashbacks in “Alphonso Guzman-Chavez” highlight just how utterly brutally rocky Ginny’s life has been. (Yes, it gets even worse.) At first, it’s unclear why Ginny is so badly scarred by memories of her friend and teammate Jordan. He seems like a sweet kid, possibly gay, with a bad relationship with his father; early shots of him moving out of the neighborhood seem bittersweet, but hardly traumatizing.
But Pitch 1×05 reveals that Jordan’s father, an alcoholic, had promised to come to Jordan and Ginny’s game. Instead, he passed out drunk on his couch and woke to a message from Bill Baker, asking him to come see his son play. So he did — driving drunk, right into the accident that took Bill’s life.
It’s a hideously rattling revelation, and one that emphasizes the fact that Ginny’s life has been a prolonged string of betrayals. While this doesn’t quite excuse her upcoming behavior, the loss and loneliness Ginny has suffered certainly casts her blind panic in a kinder light.
That panic inspires Amelia to encourage Ginny to throw her weight around in the front office, and demand that Blip not be traded. The resulting conversation is about as ludicrous as you might expect; Oscar cruelly but correctly reminds Ginny that she and her teammates earn millions of dollars playing “a kid’s game.” Yes, they all sacrifice some stability for the privilege — but they’d sacrifice a lot more to be winners.
“I was out of line,” Ginny stiffly admits, and thank goodness for that.
And in the end — despite Oscar’s keen attempt to trade Blip, thanks to Ginny — Blip remains a Padre. So does Ginny’s fellow pitcher Butch, an early casualty of the trade deadline. In their place, the goateed and slightly more sympathetic Tommy is shipped off to the Cubs.
Which, if you’re following real-life baseball, ain’t such a bad thing.
And so the trade deadline passes and the dust settles, but a few more things have been shaken loose than it initially seemed. In the front office, Charlie Graham wants Mike off the team to make room for Livan Duarte’s talent and salary; given that Mike has a no-trade clause, Oscar has his work cut out for him in that department.
And after a fame-related spat and reunion with Mike, Amelia decides to tell Ginny about the persisting affair. Ginny reacts calmly to the news… but the rattling impact is clear when she ignores a phonecall from Mike.
I highly doubt this will culminate in any kind of love triangle. (At least, I fervently hope not.) But Ginny constructs reliable pillars out of the people in her life. In the past, it was her father, Jordan, her mother, and Will, all structures that broke down around her. Now Blip, Amelia, and Mike are filling those roles, and if Pitch 1×05 is any indication, Ginny won’t react well as they begin the slow shift toward instability.
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