From the Blacklist:
“Overall, the script combines the fun of good old fashioned baseball with a more tense, thriller-y angle.”
“We want to know [what happened] and what the real truth is … we have to watch the next episode. The car chase is very tense and exciting, and it's both a relief and kind of funny when it turns out it was just a case of mistaken identity.”
“The target audience would probably skew towards men, although the writer does a nice job of incorporating women characters, which is nice to see in a show about sportswriters.”
“The language means this would air on a premium cable channel or streamer, although one can imagine a network version that could still keep much of the same tone.”
Paint the Black
An ambitious and slightly desperate young baseball journalist in Miami uncovers a dark secret about the star player of the local professional team, then risks his reputation, career and even his life as he starts blackmailing the player for front-page scoops.
Paint the Black
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Paint the Black is a sports reporting suspense drama set in today’s Miami.
This story is told through the lens of a group of tenacious beat reporters assigned to the city’s professional baseball team — the Florida Palms — and its deliriously talented, good-looking young ballplayers bathing in adoration and wealth supported by a rotating cast of hanger-ons providing the drugs, sex, and cover stories.
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By breaking a big story early in the season, Mason, virtually overnight, vaults himself into the life he’s always wanted: a regular byline splashed across the newspaper’s sports pages, local television appearances, a new car, and even a new bedmate, at least for a night.
But as soon as the success arrives, so do the threats to his livelihood and life.
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This series is driven by Mason, Cutter, Steph, and Jay, along with the rest of the baseball beat, including Wally and Alexandra. In all, we have nine full-time starters, with several bench players in steady rotation.
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Our stage is sun-drenched south Florida, its foamy shores soaked in citrus that masks those activities the postcards leave out. Florida has a way of driving people insane. Is it the humidity? The traffic? Probably both and a lot more.
But just one question: are you not entertained?
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After a treacherous climb, Mason catapults to media superstardom. But by the end, he’s still searching to fill a void he can’t quite define. Along the way, his father’s self-destruction threatens Mason’s progress at nearly every opportunity.
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This story is organic, rooted in real-life truth and lived experiences with words and scenes pulled from a cast of characters and situations the series creator witnessed and participated in for many years.
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There is considerable potential for a fervent audience because of the inspiration and entertainment our story provides, energized by characters who take seriously what they do in high-stakes environments, chasing fame and fortune despite menacing odds.
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Ryan Hatch is a writer and longtime baseball reporter. His work has appeared in ESPN, Sports Illustrated, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Time, LIFE, among others.
The show
This show explores what happens on the edges and in the darkness of spotlighted lives, revealing that the decisions we make when no one is looking define our character far beyond those we construct when we've got eyes on us.
Paint the Black is an eight-hour, sports reporting suspense drama. Set in today’s Miami, this story is told through the lens of a group of tenacious beat reporters assigned to the city’s professional baseball team — the Florida Palms — and its deliriously talented, good-looking young ballplayers bathing in adoration and wealth supported by a rotating cast of hanger-ons providing the drugs, sex, and cover stories.
It’s this stratification and collision of worlds in south Florida that drives our show, the shifting balance of power between byline-addicted journalists and pro baseball's principals, both sides risking life and limb for a commodity you can’t put a price on — attention.
The connective tissue, a currency that lives time immemorial, is survival. This story asks, again and again, for us to name the price we're willing to pay to stay in the game and get what we want ... or what we think we want.
Professional baseball is the American Dream at the highest level, and journalism is right there in our country’s foremost governing document. It's here, then, in this series about baseball reporters and the young men who play the game for an audience of millions, that we reveal the very soul of our country and who we are and where we’re going, for worse or for better.
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P.S. What does “Paint the Black” mean?
A pitcher is said to be ‘painting the black’ when he throws a pitch that barely catches the outside or inside part of home plate for a called strike. Technically, the official rules say these edges aren’t part of the base.
But official rules say a lot of things. The best players and teams know the rules so that they can break them.
Our show follows suit.
It’s this and collision of worlds that drives our show, a shifting balance of power between byline-addicted journalists and pro ball players, both sides risking life and limb for a commodity that carries no price: attention.
The stakes are raised each time Mason publishes a new story, his growing ego built on shaky ground with a man even richer in ambition and actual dollars.
Our story’s drama and plot points derive from Mason and Cutter’s big-league rivalry. It’s a zero-sum game: someone is going to win, and someone is going to lose.
We are all of these characters —we feel their hopes and dreams and failures and insecurities so deeply because we know what it means to want something so badly you will do anything and everything to get it.
Cutter, for his part, keeps his secret guarded under the arrangement and is having an MVP season on the field, but after a while there’s only so much a man can tolerate. It’s a two-player game between Cutter and Mason, a game whose rules can change with the quietest of stares, whose stakes are raised each time Mason presses ‘publish’ on a new story, the adrenaline rush feeding his growing ego built on shaky ground with a man even richer in ambition (and actual dollars) who has a vested interest in keeping what he has exactly the way he has it, and then getting more of it.
And you can better believe that Cutter, whose face adorns seemingly every billboard in town, wants it all. He, too, starts risking life and limb to stay on the field and keep his shameful ways off the front page and away from his family’s scope.
In the beginning of our story, Mason has nothing to lose and just wants a chance. He gets one. But by the end of the first season, while he may have gotten what he wanted, the price was higher than he ever could have imagined and with every passing day he becomes more isolated and desperate in new ways. Bigger bylines, bigger problems. Because Mason is flawed, too, blinded by a carousel of temptations to get ahead while his moral compass shifts as he charts a course that he believes will satisfy a desire he could never quite define in the first place.
We are Mason — we are Cutter and we are Steph and we are Jay. We are all of these characters. We feel their hopes and dreams and their failures and insecurities so deeply because we know what it means to want something so badly you will do anything and everything to get it.
Mason’s heart is usually in the right place, as evidenced in part by his ongoing care and commitment to his father, Jay, a man whose wisdom almost runs as deep as his desire to destroy everyone and everything in his path — cancer and advanced age be damned. A lifelong addiction to drink and a steady program of emotional abuse aimed in every direction, Jay can’t help but drag everyone around down with him, even and perhaps especially when it comes to his own son. We hurt those we’re closest to, etc. Such as when, halfway through the season, Jay not-so-inadvertently frames Mason for drug possession, only to be later rescued by Mason who trades a dignity-defying favor with an intrepid rival.
In this new life, Mason is constantly searching for the next story, which means he’s searching for the truth. But at the end of the pilot episode, as Mason slowly uncovers a dark secret about the team’s star player and hometown hero — the delectable slugger, Cutter Alvarez — the truth soon takes our characters hostage.
Mason begins to risk his reputation, career, and even his life as he starts blackmailing Cutter for scoops as they meet in dark alleyways and communicate via burner phones.
Right away, Mason is baptized into life on the baseball beat when he faces a nasty strike from a separate reporter, suffering a spectacular public and professional humiliation.
He finds redemption as the truth is revealed, but it’s a treacherous road back.
The story
Respect is earned on the baseball beat and not just anyone can join its ranks. You have to work for it. Every day.
Mason Shays is a thirty-something bricklayer in a city full of them. Every day, he 9-to-5s, soaking in the Miami humidity. At night, he delivers newspapers. All this to afford drive-thru dinners, a studio apartment, and a nurse for his bristling, ailing father. Mason’s girlfriend, if you can call her that, can’t wait to break up with him.
When we meet Mason, he’s pouring heavy concrete under an annihilating Florida sun. While focused on the task, his attention is elsewhere, stealing glances of Palms Stadium half a mile away, Miami’s glistening pro baseball field.
See, Mason specifically delivers newspapers for a reason — to get as close as he can to the only line of work he’s ever wanted: to write about baseball. He files short game stories about the local high school teams, but it’s not enough. He wants more, something bigger. It’s that or swinging a hammer. He’s not going to waste away in a dead-end office job like everyone else.
With an undercurrent of desperation buoyed by high stepping ambition, Mason earns through hard work and good timing an opportunity to cover south Florida’s professional baseball team as a beat reporter for the Miami Times newspaper. He has one month to prove himself.
He does. By breaking a big story early in the season, Mason, virtually overnight, vaults himself into the life he’s always wanted: a regular byline splashed across the newspaper’s sports pages, local television appearances, a new car, and even a new bedmate, at least for a night.
Mason’s journey is one of hubris and humility. After a tense scene in the locker room during the pilot episode, one of the beat reporters immediately recognizes Mason’s aptitude and ambition, and she knows it’s in her interest to keep him close.
In a pivotal scene later at a seedy club, this reporter draws something of an alliance with Mason by showing him how to earn the players’ trust. (Spoiler: don’t report everything you see.) Later, Mason is baptized into life on the beat when he faces a nasty strike from a separate reporter, suffering a spectacular public and professional humiliation. He eventually recovers once the truth sets him free, but it’s a treacherous road back.
Starting lineup
This series is driven by Mason, Cutter, Steph, and Jay, along with the rest of the baseball beat, including Wally and Alexandra.
In all, we have nine full-time starters, with several bench players in steady rotation. Like any good baseball season, characters go on hot streaks and then struggle, their storylines unpredictable and prone to terrible setbacks yet still given paths to redemption and heroics.
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Mason Shays | baseball reporter
Age: 32
Income: $32,455 / year
Education: two years of community college
Notable: Mason’s clear eyes and steady hand give cover to latent anxiety, generational trauma always bubbling under the surface. Mason’s ambition outpaces his talent.
Born in the shadows of Miami’s glamour, he knows the streets and the players, and uses it to his advantage. And he isn’t going to slide into mediocrity like so many other of the guys he grew up with. But time’s running out.
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Season 1: Mason gets his wish, but the cost is great and more sensational than any story he’s ever written.
You root for Mason, oh yeah, but sometimes you wonder if he’s swinging a bit too hard at pitches outside the zone.
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Cutter Alvarez | pro baseball slugger
Age: 28
Income: $27 million / year
Education: mostly his own press clippings
Notable: A delectable, perfect specimen of a human being baseball player. Cutter measures 6-foot-3 and carries 225 pounds of chiseled muscle to go with blue eyes and a 90-degree angled jawline that all of Miami has seen on billboards around town.
Cutter is confident and calculated yet self-conscious after two decades spent with the entire world watching and waiting on his every next move.—————
Season 1: Cutter’s MVP season is cheered on by millions of adoring fans, but the secret he’s harboring stands to eat him alive.
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Steph Kline | baseball reporter
Age: 27
Income: $55,000 / year
Education: Yale, cum laude
Notable: Tightly wound. Nervous, suspicious of everyone. Takes her job acutely-serious, herself too. Won a Pulitzer prize in college, and worries that’ll be the height of her career and life.
Steph seems to always wear sunglasses that cover half her face and she holds a giant iced coffee that she never finishes.
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Season 1: Steph becomes Mason’s confidante and best friend, but by the end, the relationship has soured, now sworn enemies. But she might also be in love with him, and vice versa.
Towards the end of the first season, Steph becomes intimate with a man (not Mason) for the first time. She’s left scarred and more distrustful than ever.
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Alexandra Vargas | baseball reporter
Age: 45
Income: $72,000 / year + $150,000 annual trust fund that she’ll never reveal
Education: University of Miami (or so she claims)
Bio: Quick temper and reckless. Every gold chain Alexandra owns, she wears.
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Season 1: Alexandra appears to be blazing her path as a minority female baseball beat reporter — no small feat, kid — but privately she’s falling apart: drinking, prescription pills, men of the night … and her editor has her on a short leash.
Alexandra is desperate and it’s a dangerous spot for her and for anyone else within radius.
Oh, and that guy she severely injures with her truck truck while high on perc in episode 2? His brother is starting to ask questions.
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Jay Shays | drifter; Mason's dad
Age:65
Income: $1,200 / month social security check
Education: nope
Bio: Seemingly always on his back — on the couch, on a park bench after a bender — Jay is perpetually drenched in sweat. Jay enjoyed life. Now he’s paying the price.
An addict who can deliver alarming wisdom when you least expect it, Jay has been dragging everyone down for six decades. Not least of which is his only son, Mason.
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Season 1: Jay finds himself ignoring cancer treatment protocols and indulging his favorite vices: the bottle, the women, and the psychological violence.
In the season finale, he has to make a choice when stakes are highest — yep, you guessed it: when his son needs him most.
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Wally Morton | baseball reporter
Age: 60
Income: $90,000 / year
Education: Hemingway and the bible
Bio: Wally’s been covering baseball for two centuries. His skin is perma-red, his hair ghost white. A southerner who speaks with a drawl but can type faster than anyone else on the beat, Wally is a master of his craft.
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Season 1: Wally remains the patriarch of the beat, but the game is starting to pass him by — the internet, the soundbites, the readers … they seem to want something else. Can Wally, a man of a certain generation, still play in the big leagues? Wally’s character asks us to reflect on our own mortality in more ways than one.
Wally, himself our most unsentimental character — sets us up for perhaps the greatest moments of heartbreak.
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Eddie Maddon | sports editor
Age:55
Income: $100,000 / year
Education: Rutgers (dropped out after 1 week)
Bio: A gold chain woven into always-visible grey chest hair, an athletic gait. The kind of guy who always carries cash. A mercurial editor who survives on powdered donuts and gets off on making and breaking careers.
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Season 1: Eddie drives Mason hard and pushes him past his breaking point on more than one occasion. But Eddie has Mason’s best interests in mind.
Meanwhile, Eddie is caught up in a real estate deal gone bad that leaves him trading favors he’d rather forget in the morning.
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Kelly Layman | school teacher & stripper
Age: 27
Income: $24,000 / year from teaching; $175,000 / year from “restaurant job”
Education: Florida State!!!
Bio: Kelly’s a history teacher who wears leather and leopard that reveals just enough in just the right places.
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Season 1: Kelly and Mason break up within the first few scenes, but her character remains in our world and in Mason’s life, as she becomes something of an asset to him, though she of course has her own motives.
Kelly uses Mason for her own gain and is, above all else, a master manipulator, turning grown men to dust.
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Ana Diego | clinical nurse
Age: unreported, maybe 40s
Income: unreported
Education: unreported
Bio: We meet Ana as an unassuming in-home nurse. Soon, she finds herself in a high-stakes world of illegal drugs and professional baseball players with reporters asking questions in her adopted language.
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Season 1: We quickly understand that Ana’s greatest gift is her discretion — a skill learned quickly when not all of your immigration papers line up as they should.
While in a peripheral role in the beginning, Ana sees some daylight: these boys, up to no good, would be smart to keep her quiet. It’ll cost them.
The setting
Our stage is sun-drenched south Florida, its foamy shores soaked in citrus masks those activities the postcards leave out. You know, like sex and drugs and violence.
Florida has a way of driving people insane. Is it the humidity? The traffic? Probably both and a lot more. When you’re in Florida it feels like you’re getting away with something — it shouldn’t be this nice, this cheap, this sunny, and truth be told, this friendly. Black, white, Cuban: who cares? We’re all fucking hot and want to get to the beach or get the hell away from the beach. Hurricane coming? Ah, forget it, they always miss.
For three decades, Mason’s heard and shared all the tropes about Florida. But like a younger brother, only he’s allowed to make fun of the subject. Because for all its cracks and scars, Florida is home, and Mason understands its heartbeat and why it acts the way it does as well if not better than anyone. That’s what happens when you grow up on the edges of society — you learn the way things work because you have to learn how things work. Otherwise you die.
Laugh at, and hate on, the state of Florida and its characters all that you want.
But just ask yourself one question: Are you not entertained?
Indeed, Florida serves as a character in and of itself in this series. The oppressive heat and humidity help set the tone in the opening pages of the pilot when Mason labors at the construction site and the baseball reporters sweat out another day looking for a usable quote. Later in the episode, the deluge of rain adds drama and danger to an already frightful scene.
We see in these pages that Florida runs on highways and strip clubs, fast food and traffic, the sunny skies watching over a melting pot of ethnicities and shifting motives, everyone trying to make a buck. Yes, there’s money here, lots of it. The Miami skyline was built on cash stuffed in suitcases, one Cessna flight from Colombia at a time. But Florida also runs on keeping the poor poor, gatekeeping opportunities that leave upward mobility in sight but just out of reach.
In this series, Florida is fully realized and we treat it with respect, from the glitz of Miami’s ultra-rich to the men and women who run nail salons and drive buses and who dream of something different. We keep the lens unsentimental, allowing us to understand what makes Florida a worldwide fascination. Florida is Florida, take it or leave it.
Yeah, it might be fucked up eight days a week in Florida, from Pensacola to the Keys. And sure, laugh at it and hate on it all you want. But ask yourself just one question: Are you not entertained?
Season 1
The first season catapults Mason to media superstardom … but at what price?
Episodes 1-3
The pilot episode opens with Mason securing a coveted, hard-won spot as a baseball beat reporter covering the vaunted Florida Palms. Immediately, Mason clashes with his new world, fielding threats from fellow journalists, his wayward father, and the city’s lurking threats — like the men who mistakenly beat him within an inch of his life.
All the while, our story carries urgency as Mason begins to carve out a name for himself as he delivers splashy stories that titillate, inform, and delight readers and his editors alike. It’s in these first three episodes we learn that the drama, storylines, and dark humor will derive from high-stakes relationship between Mason and Cutter Alvarez, the Palms’ gorgeous, steroid-guzzling slugger.
Episodes 4-6
The baseball beat is the hardest job in journalism, and Mason relearns this lesson every day. But the job beats working, and Mason isn’t about to let the opportunity slip, figuring out how to tell big stories and become the reporter he wants to be.
One night, after Mason gets tossed in jail for defending a kid who’s being ganged up on in an alley, Mason uses his one phone call from jail to call his editor, making sure his story hits deadline.
In these middle episodes, we expand into the beat reporters and their stories. Alexandra is struggling to make rent and keep her job. The internet and social media is passing Wally by and he fears he can’t keep up. Steph, uber-confident on the exterior, is falling apart when she realizes she has no one in her life, and keeps driving people away, even though all she wants is for someone to really see her.
Cutter? He’s delivering an MVP season. But his wife is increasingly suspicious of rumors that he’s straying. Cutter is tolerating Mason’s needy blackmailing because he can’t afford to drop the steroid enhancement — he’s due for a big contract after the season — but he’s getting awfully sick of kowtowing to a nobody reporter. He’s Cutter Alvarez, for God’s sake.
Mason’s father, Jay, has relapsed and is willfully ignoring his cancer diagnosis. Mason has to contend with wanting to save his father but faces a painful struggle and realization that you can only help someone so much, no matter how much you love them. The weight of Jay’s drama threatens to derail Mason’s burgeoning baseball writing career, if not his life altogether.
One night, after Mason gets tossed in jail for defending a cousin, Mason uses his one phone call from the holding cell to call the newsroom, making sure his story hits deadline.
Mason’s journey is at once excruciating and exhilarating, at times ten steps forwards followed by twenty backwards.
The cutthroat world he’s entered threatens his every move because, ultimately, nobody really wants him to succeed.
Episodes 7-8
As we reach the end of the Palms’ season, Mason’s relationship with his father is at an all-time low, especially after Jay’s bad habits land Mason is legal trouble, and it’s Mason who has to ask a favor of Alexandra, who’s now his biggest rival on the beat.
Mason’s journey is at once excruciating and exhilarating, at times ten steps forwards followed by twenty back. The cutthroat world he’s entered threatens his every move because, ultimately, nobody really wants him to succeed.
Meanwhile, Mason’s tête-à-tête with Cutter reaches a boiling point. After initially backing off, Mason realizes he can’t live with himself if he doesn’t publish the truth about Cutter, even if it means risking his career, and his life, by going public with the story. Publishing the story catapults Mason to media superstardom, but he’s left wondering if it was all worth it, with new threats headed his way.
When Cutter’s goons come back to finish the job they started in episode one, Jay reappears and pays the ultimate sacrifice to save his son’s life.
Mason, in our final scene, finally listens to a New York area code voicemail he’s been ignoring for weeks. The call hints at Season 2’s location.
Why this story, and why now?
This story is organic, rooted in real-life truth and lived experiences, words and scenes pulled from a cast of characters and situations imprinted on me all those years ago that I draw inspiration from.
I love baseball.
At 39, I still love baseball the same way I did when I was a kid, glued to our grainy kitchen television on summer nights, begging my mom to let me stay up and watch the game just a little bit longer. Indeed, I have loved the game of baseball since I formed consciousness and could hold a thought and a bat. Growing up, I played in little league tournaments across the country, and during my senior year of high school I was named to Colorado’s All-Star team. At the end of that year, in my last ever at-bat, I hit a home run. The wind probably helped.
My childhood may very well have ended that spring day, but my love for the game did not. Baseball remains to me a treasure, and I knew that when I could no longer play the game competitively, I would stay close by spending my life writing about it.
I’ve been lucky to live that dream. For nearly two decades, I have been writing about professional baseball. I spent several seasons as a beat reporter covering the New York Yankees, a defining time in my career and life.
Throughout, I have stood in almost every professional baseball locker room in America, filing stories on deadline late into the night. I’ve interviewed minor leaguers and hall of famers, famous coaches and billionaire team owners. I’ve spoken with and told the stories of parking lot attendants and security guards and I once spent a day with a Japanese-English translator while we ate pork dumplings, keen on better understanding his lens into American culture.
Baseball reporting has catapulted me into euphoric highs and driven me to the edge of maniacal madness. With time, I’ve learned that both positions should be appreciated and processed evenly. There’s always tomorrow, for better and for worse. It is this perspective and these lessons learned that allows me to say with pride that I belong to a class of American baseball writers respected by both peers and subjects.
Breaking a big story is like sex — except it’s better. Every day on the baseball beat might offer a life-changing moment. You have to be ready.
You’re reporting on a game, yes, but your livelihood, and everyone else’s, is always at stake.
In these two decades writing and reporting about baseball, I’ve helped tell countless stories about the game. But there is still one that I need to tell. It’s the one you’re reading about right now. This pilot episode and show bible I’ve written and created has been more than a decade in the making. On my very first day at Yankees spring training camp in Florida, in 2012, I envisioned a distinct scene that you’ll find on the final page of the first episode.
Elsewhere, the dialogue and relationships among the beat reporters and players are also pulled from that time. This story is organic, rooted in real-life truth and lived experiences, words and scenes pulled from a cast of characters and situations imprinted on me all those years ago that I still think about and draw inspiration from.
This rich, fantastical world that lives so close to us has never been explored on screen before. I am bringing it to life to capture what I consider the most fascinating side of journalism in its purest form.
This story is of course about baseball, but here, the game itself plays backdrop to the stories of the people powering the game’s ecosystem — reporters, players, coaches, and hanger-ons you never knew existed. We’ve seen baseball fictionalized before, the stories often steeped in nostalgia and feel-good plot lines featuring triumphs in Iowa cornfields and when women stepped in for men during the war, creating a league all their own. I’ve probably seen Moneyball twenty times.
These movies are some of my favorites. But this show I’ve created alters the view of the game and explores the world of baseball’s beat reporters and their relationships with each other, the players, and the public. I want to tell this story because it’s such a fun, heartbreaking, hilarious, tragic tale all at once. In baseball, they say you can watch a thousand games and during the next one you’ll witness something you’ve never seen before. That happens in this show, too.
This rich, fantastical world that lives so close to us has never been explored on screen before.
I am bringing it to life to capture what I consider the most fascinating side of journalism in its purest form.
I’m able to capture this originality because I know baseball reporters. I know where they eat, how they talk, where they go at night, and how they feel about the game, the players, and each other.
They’re indignant, humble, prideful, insecure, bored — and that’s all before first pitch.
Still, I know that it is no small feat to keep audiences engaged. They are smart. They know imitation when they see it. Because I am so familiar with baseball reporting, I know how to present and produce truth and legitimacy from an authentic point of view. I understand the craft of structuring these stories inside this world. I’m able to capture this originality because I get how baseball reporters talk, act, and eat, and I know what they think of their editors and the players they write about. Most importantly, I know what they think of each other.
I also know where they go at night (the bar), how they get their sources (agents; girlfriends; security guards), and I know all too well the immense pressure and pleasure of delivering and owning a story that no other reporter has, one that is going to turn the week on its head. Oh, what a high it is. Breaking a big story is like sex except it’s better. Every day on the baseball beat might offer a life-changing moment. You have to be ready. You’re reporting on a game, but your livelihood and everyone else’s is always at stake.
I believe so strongly in this story and this series. There is considerable potential for a significant, fervent audience because of the inspiration and entertainment our story provides, energized by characters who take seriously what they do in high-stakes environments, chasing glory despite menacing odds.
This show will inspire, titillate, and deliver payoffs in both the short and long term. Storytelling at its finest, we will open the viewer’s world and take them on a journey by defying expectations and satisfying the need to see themselves in characters filled with pride, humility, ambition and defeat. I have the vision, creativity, and unflinching zeal to share and produce this story with the world.
Audience and market
In 2024, 71 million people attended a Major League Baseball game. That same season, ESPN’s Sunday night baseball broadcast averaged over 1MM viewers, its most watched season in five years.
In this country, sports is culture and culture is sports — have you watched a New York Knicks game recently? A-list celebrities line the court. In Chicago, actors and politicians sing and lead the 7th inning stretch every game. Beyonce plays the Superbowl and Tom Brady was roasted on Comedy Central. ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith, once an NBA beat reporter, now might run for president due in large part to the name he’s made debating and analyzing sports.
Yes, we love sports, and we seemingly cannot get enough of them, or what goes on around them. That’s what this story and series is about. Because it’s what audiences want.
Comparable shows and films, tonally and stylistically
Moneyball
Eastbound & Down
A League of Their Own
Eight Men Out
Field of Dreams
Bull Durham
42
Major League
A professional baseball team lying about a player’s arm injury hardly qualifies as the end of democracy. Happens every day.
But when we operate in a world where the obfuscation of truth is allowed if not outright celebrated, the fabric begins to fray. And with enough practiced indifference and willful ignorance pervading our collective consciousness, over time, there’s nothing left to save us from the inevitable fall.
Spring Breakers
Bad Monkey
Miami Vice
Body Heat
Bloodline
Dexter
Moonlight
The Florida Project
Elsewhere, there are several successful television series that allow a specific expertise and discipline to power a show. Some recent examples include: The Bear. The Pitt. The Rehearsal.
All follow the blueprint of telling stories through accuracy and lived experiences while hemming close to the details that define authenticity and, simply, put butts in the seats.
The sheer number of people watching sports and tracking the every move of players, teams, and coaches, show us that there’s an audience ready to see the game from a fresh, yet familiar perspective. One, again, rooted in originality and faithful to its real-life subjects.
Same goes for this show. And never before has a sports series ever told the story through the lens of beat reporters, and now is the time. Beat reporters remains the lifeblood of sports reporting and bringing truth and accuracy to the broader sports landscape. That story you saw on TV last night about your favorite player? The report was first dug up by a beat reporter through tenacious, relentless, and brave reporting, asking questions in pursuit of the truth. People read the work of beat reporters (inside and outside sports) every day, they just don’t know it.
Some roll their eyes or ignore the idea that the future of our country hangs in the balance of an honest and independent press. I do not. It is critical we are able to operate and function in a transparent society that we can trust. This story will entertain and make you laugh and cry, yes, but it will also demonstrate the critical role a free press plays in our society.
One omission or one lie to the public from a professional baseball team about a pitcher’s arm injury isn’t the end of democracy. But when we operate in a world where the obfuscation of truth is allowed if not outright celebrated, the fabric begins to fray. And with enough practiced indifference and willful ignorance pervading our collective consciousness, over time, there’s nothing left to save us from the inevitable fall.
It’s why we have to tell this story.
About the series creator
Ryan Hatch is a writer and designer. His work has appeared in ESPN, Sports Illustrated, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Time, LIFE, and People, among others.
He graduated with honors from Columbia Journalism School, and has reported on national politics, the World Series, the Super Bowl, and has written extensively about animals and health, with many appearances on television and radio.
He lives in New York.
Contact
970.215.8229
