Rather than pick out one of my earlier entries, I came up with this.
While scrolling through YouTube recently, I chanced upon a channel that featured pilots of TV shows that never made it to series.
Imagine my surprise to find this 1965 production called Starr of the Yankees.
Unlike some other baseball-themed programs that actually made it to an extended — if brief — run, this one, with Martin Milner in the title role, was actually not terrible. And by that I mean the story was decent, the acting not too bad, and even Milner standing in at the plate was pretty believable. (You probably remember Milner from such TV classics as Route 66 and Adam-12.) Stuart Whitman — another TV veteran — played his teammate who offered sage advice.
Some of those aforementioned TV series included Bay City Blues (eight episodes), Ball Four,(seven), and the 1993 version of A League of Their Own (six). More recent attempts: Pitch, about the first woman in MLB, and another try at ALOTO.
Here’s the IMDB blurb for Starr:
New York Yankee rookie Joe Starr (Martin Milner) attempts to make a comeback after being injured when he is hit in the head by a baseball during a game.
Although the Yankees locker room looked a bit bare for such a big deal major league team (hand-written name plates for Mantle, Ford, Bauer, and Howard?), the action sequences and outside shots of the House that Ruth Built were welcome. None of the Yankees of the day were actually in the production and the actor who ostensibly played Casey Stengel was referred to in the credits simply as “Yankee manager.” Interestingly, umpire Art Passarella played the arbiter behind home plate. Passarella had 16 acting rcedits according to IMDB, including “1st umpire” in a 1969 episode of Ironside (“The Tormentor“) and “Series Umpire” in “Flashing Spikes,” an episode of Alcoa Premier (which also featured such prominent actors as Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne and his son Patrick, Jack Warden, and Edgar Buchanan; major league personalities Vin Scully and Don Drysdale also appeared in that program). Passarella was also in That Touch of Mink in which he threw out Doris Day from the Yankees dugout.
Starr was directed by Arthur Hiller, whom you might remember from such hits as Love Story, The In-Laws, and The Babe. Okay, so that last one wasn’t a hit.
Starr might seem a bit hokey but it was passable, although I don’t know how they thought this could be a series. To be fair, IMDB does identify the 30-minute program as a “TV movie.”