PITCH “Alfonzo Guzman-Chavez” Recap

By Ruby Campos

Friends and Deadlines

This week’s episode starts off with a 48 hour time stamp to the trade deadline. Oscar, who is given the responsibility of trading a few Padres players must also make a hefty $2 million dollar cut in the payroll.

Meanwhile as Oscar gets to work; Ginny is really anxious about the upcoming event. Mike, who has a no trade clause assures her that they wouldn’t dare trade her since she is so popular, but Ginny seems to be more worried about her team members leaving. It’s actually quite moving how genuinely attached to her team she has become over the past weeks.

Later on at the Sanders’ household, while Evelyn tries to persuade Blip into buying the house she’s been eyeing and Ginny centralizes her worries on the possibility of Blip getting traded. She tells him and Evelyn that they are the only friends she has left. Well here come the tears.

Cue the flashback to Ginny’s past, and we see someone, who we assume is one of the few friends she had at a younger age, except he’s driving away in a moving truck. Flashback a bit more, we find out the friend’s name is Jordan Collins, a new player on Ginny’s team. When he first starts talking to her, Ginny thinks he’s flirting with her however he makes it clear that he just wants to be friends like her. A start to a beautiful friendship that we already know is going to end in sadness, be ready folks.

Back to the present, Butch, the oldest player for the Padres is the first to be traded and there are still 27 hours left for Oscar to finish the trade and make the payroll cuts. Tommy tells Ginny that his kid and Butch’s were best friends, showing another side to the effects of trading baseball players, it doesn’t just affect the players but also their families.

Later on, Blip spends the night hanging out at Mike’s house and quickly reaches the conclusion that Mike and Amelia are sleeping together. He also immediately realizes how super awkward it will be if Ginny finds out about them in the wrong way because it would be like they were keeping it a secret from her, which they kind of are.

Ginny who seems to be obsessed with Blip’s trading fate is paying another visit to the Sanders family. Her stressing about Blip turns into her attempting to comfort her friend and assure him that he probably won’t get traded. Blip, who is clearly getting more stressed out about the situation, doesn’t feel comforted by Ginny’s attempts at reassurance and storms out of the room. Yikes.

With just 2 hours left until the trade deadline, Amelia advises Ginny that if it’s that important to her to keep Blip on the team, she should just go to Oscar and demand that her friend stay, after all she is the most popular player on the team as of late. When Ginny does go down to Oscar’s office and demands Blip’s security on the team, Oscar goes off and lectures her about all the hard work and money that goes into baseball. He basically tells her she was out of line and that he can’t just not trade a player simply because Ginny doesn’t want him to.

We return to the Ginny and Jordan’s baseball game a few years previous to the present. We find out that Jordan’s dad is an alcoholic. He promised his son that he would finally watch him play but he doesn’t show and Jordan is devastated. Ginny’s dad gives Jordan’s a call and he doesn’t get the message until after the game but tries to get there anyways, drunk. We get a replay of the flashback scene from the pilot from a different perspective and it turns out that Jordan’s dad is the drunk driver who hits Ginny and her dad on the way back from the game, killing Ginny’s father. There it is, the heartbreaking moment of the episode.

With mere minutes left until the deadline, Blip apologizes to Ginny and they sit together and wait for the results. Oscar manages to make a few trades, getting Butch back, trading Tommy away, and Blip is staying right where he is, and all within budget.

The stresses of the trade are barely seconds behind him when Oscar is told he isn’t exactly finished making trades. He needs to find a way to trade Mike, who has the no trade clause but make him think it was his idea to leave the team, because there’s a Cuban catcher on the horizon.

The episode closes with Amelia finally telling Ginny that she’s been seeing Mike for a few weeks. Although she seems to handle it well, or at least put on a nonchalant face, you can just tell Ginny isn’t too pleased with this. She excuses herself to go change and perfect timing shows Mike calling Ginny but she hits decline and continues walking. Uh oh.

Notes

• Just a quick note: Josh Peck’s appearance in this episode as Oscar’s not so bright intern was a nice little surprise that brought a some fun lightheartedness to Oscar’s part in the episode.
• The importance of friendship to Ginny in this episode was so touching and so nicely done. From previous episodes, we can tell that Ginny didn’t really have a lot of time for hanging out and making friends because she and her father were so focused on her baseball career. It only seems natural that she would try her best to hang on to the few genuine friendships that she has, like hers with Blip. It’s also a little heartbreaking to think about how much she clings to the ones close to her because she really has lost so many important people in her life already; her father, her mother (in the sense that they weren’t on good terms for years), and probably one of the closest friends she had, Jordan.

Catch Pitch Thursdays at 9/8c on Fox.