Kylie Bunbury, Mark-Paul Gosselaar, Rick Singer, and Kevin Falls Preview ‘Pitch’

The new FOX drama Pitch already has everyone talking.

The series, which premieres next week, follows Ginny Baker (Kylie Bunbury), the first female baseball player to make it to the major leagues.

Once she joins the team, she’s instantly famous, but she also has to prove herself to her teammates — particularly to the team’s catcher, Mike Lawson (Mark-Paul Gosselaar).

At the ATX Television Festival earlier this summer, stars Kylie Bunbury and Mark-Paul Gosselaar, along with co-creator Rick Singer and executive producer Kevin Falls, sat down with reporters to preview the show.

Bunbury’s description of her character is enough to make anyone want to watch Pitch.

“I would describe her as incredibly strong. The thing I really liked about this character is that she is not portrayed as a superhuman at all. She’s a regular human, just with a lot of focus. She’s strong, but she’s also really vulnerable just like all women are. So you’re getting to see a really complex female character that everyone can relate to. So it’s me. I’m Ginny,” Bunbury laughed.

The role also required a good deal of training for the actors.

“I had two months to learn how to pitch,” Bunbury said, though she did come from an athletic background. “My dad played professionally in soccer, and my brother currently plays professional soccer, so watching their work ethic and how they deal with things really lent itself to how I worked on this character.”

As for Mark-Paul Gosselaar, preparing for the role involved a little more than learning to play baseball. “I ate a lot,” Gosselaar said.

“You’re solid right now!” Bunbury replied.

Not to mention, everyone has noticed the beard Gosselaar grew for the role.

“Yeah, that’s been great for my marriage,” he laughed.

“Your beard has really been a huge topic of discussion,” Bunbury added.

“I love bringing more attention to myself,” Gosselaar joked.

In all seriousness, the training was something the actors really threw themselves into. Gosselaar explained what training was like for him, and why it’s a “dream job” for him to play Mike Lawson.

“I think we all got about two months of training. Being a catcher is very specific. There’s a very complex position on the field sort of like the on-field coach at the time. It’s really the only player besides the pitcher that has the ball in their hand every play on the field, and really the only player that will be there game after game,” Gosselaar said.

“But training was just going to the gym a little bit more and working with our baseball technical advisers — the same people that did Moneyball. We worked with retired baseball players. Greg Olson was a pitching coach. Royce Clayton was my batting coach. Talk about a dream job for an actor. I mean, what actor doesn’t want to be in sports? What sports doesn’t wanna be on TV? It’s just a great combination of the two,” he continued.

I think we really just started living our lives like professional athletes,” Bunbury added. “Eating like a professional athlete, working out like a professional athlete. So three days a week we’d work with our baseball trainers, and then also three days a week I was working with a boxing a trainer.”

“I became very demanding, just like a professional player,” Gosselaar chimed in. “I started talking to myself in the third person. I became very difficult, because as an all-star player, I had to be that,” he joked.

“The writers have all started working out like professional athletes as well,” Rick Singer laughed.

It’s clear this group likes to have a good time, but they’re more than dedicated to their roles, as Kevin Falls was quick to point out.

“I’ve worked with Mark-Paul before, as I have Kylie, [and] they throw themselves into it. A lot of times you have to tell actors to train. [But] they call me like, ‘I wanna keep working out.’ And we’ve already wrapped the pilot,” Falls said.

“But we had to because of MLB,” Gosselaar admitted. “There was a whole reason we had to look the way we did.”

That reason has everything to do with authenticity, which Singer explained. “This is the first television show that’s ever gotten the full participation of Major League Baseball. And so one of the tenets of the agreement was that it be as authentic as possible.” That includes the actors being able to play the game in a way that looks realistic.

Mark-Paul Gosselaar is probably best known for his role as Zack Morris from Saved by the Bell, and Kylie Bunbury wasn’t afraid to admit she was excited to work with him.

“You know that went through your mind while we were shooting,” Gosselaar said to Bunbury, laughing. “You totally know. You were like, ‘Oh my god, I can’t believe I’m doing a scene with Zack Morris.’“

“One-hundred percent,” Bunbury replied. “I definitely had that moment. I’m not gonna lie.”

There may be the possibility of a relationship between their two characters down the road, though in the pilot, it’s only hinted at slightly when, in the spirit of baseball tradition, they slap each others’ butts on the field.

“He has very soft hands,” Bunbury said when asked what that scene was like for her.

“What was it like slapping my ass back, though?” Gosselaar asked.

“A really hard butt, and soft hands,” she laughed.

Bunbury went on to say that she’s looking forward to seeing what happens between the two characters. “That will be a really fun part of the show to explore — is our relationship and what happens with that.”

Falls added, “There’s an undeniable chemistry between the two. So you’re kind of like, we can’t rush that. But it’s there, and the audience likes them together, so let them speculate.”

“In baseball particularly, there’s really no closer relationship on the field. You also have to get inside each others’ minds,” Singer explained.

Kevin Falls and Mark-Paul Gosselaar have worked together before. Falls is the creator of TNT’s Franklin and Bash, in which Gosselaar starred alongside Breckin Meyer.

So when it was time to start casting for Pitch, Falls said he immediately thought of Gosselaar, who is also his good friend and neighbor.

“Everybody’s chasing the same actors, and I’m thinking, Mark-Paul would be great for this. But I don’t want to come in and go, ‘hey, I want my guy,'” he admitted. So he added his name to the list, but he didn’t push the issue.

Gosselaar then went on to explain how he first heard about the part.

“I remember this, because we went out to dinner and we went with Breckin, and we went with some of the writers from Franklin and Bash. We’re all a tight group. And [Kevin] said he was doing these thing with Pitch, and I was like, ‘Oh what’s that about?’ ‘That’s a major league — it’s about this woman who makes it to the majors.’ In my head I was like, “Oh that’s… good luck with that,” Gosselaar said.

“Because, if you just see it on paper, a woman makes it to the majors, you’re thinking, what gimmick do they use? Is it gonna be a knuckleball? Like, what’s the angle here?” he continued. “Cut to a week later. I got the script, read it, and […] I called him and said, this is really f*cking good. Why didn’t you tell me? This is — I want this! This is what I want to do this season! And he’s like, ‘Well come in and read. And I’m like, ‘Yeah, I’m gonna come in and read!'”

And according to Falls, co-creator Dan Fogleman had a good feeling about Gosselaar right away.

“Dan Fogleman said, you know, I think Mark-Paul Gosselaar is gonna crush this,” Falls remembered. “He came to it on his own. And then he talked about like, let’s reinvent him. Let’s get him to grow a beard, cut his hair short, and make him look like a ball player. And so to Dan’s credit, he’s the one who said, let’s make the move.”

Singer added that both the part of Mike Lawson and the part of Ginny Baker were difficult to cast at first.

“I genuinely got to the point with both parts where I really felt like, ‘we’re not gonna find this person. We’re just not going to.’ Weeks and weeks and weeks went by on both of them,” Singer said. But then both Bunbury and Gosselaar auditioned, and that was it. “They just claimed the part the second they walked in the room. They walked in the room as those people, as if they’d been those people. It was fantastic.”

The cast of Pitch also includes Dan Lauria, Ali Larter, Mark Consuelos, Mo McCray, Meagan Holder, and Tim Jo, making for a truly incredible cast, which both Bunbury and Gosselaar praised.

Additionally, Ginny’s father is played by Michael Beach (Sons of Anarchy, The 100). Bunbury spoke a bit about what it was like to work with him as well.

“He’s fantastic. He has so much gravitas, and is just such a professional. Our chemistry was really good, I mean, because there were some difficult scenes that we had to do together. And then he had to do the young Ginny as well, and he just brought a lot of heart to it,” Bunbury said. “Michael brought heart and warmth to the some difficult scenes.”

Bunbury also stated that moving forward, we can expect flashbacks to explore the characters and their relationship with another, including Ginny with her father as well as with Ali Lauter’s character, Amelia.

Beyond the pilot episode, which really does feel like a great sports film, we can expect to see continued development of each character and their relationships both on and off the field.

“There’s a lot of inherent stakes in a baseball season that are human stakes. Players get traded. People want to win all-star games. There’s a lot of pressure on marriages because you’re on the road so much. So we want to be able to tell those stories as we go forward,” Falls confirmed.

And according to Singer, Ginny joining the team is just the beginning of the story.

“She just got a shot out of a cannon into wonderland. She’s the most famous person in the country overnight,” he said. “What is it to try and keep your place on the team and thrive in the major leagues? Which is hard enough in and of itself, much less at the same time being the face of a gender and having to carry that torch.”

Singer went on to say that it’s a bit like “the idea that sort of Jackie Robinson with real-time social media, and what he would have had to have gone through, and what that journey would be like. And put the gender element on top of it, to me, that’s the story as you’re going forward through the years,” he explained.

On top of that, he described Ginny as being a “young woman who’s really had blinders on for most of her life” and that the show will explore her “coming into her own as a woman, and starting to have all the elements of an adult life.”

That sounds pretty exciting, if you ask me.

Pitch premieres Thursday, September 22nd at 9/8c on Fox.

You can also check out all of our coverage of the ATX Television Festival right here.

18 New Fall TV Shows You’ll Definitely Want to Watch