Sliding into Home: The Chicago Cubs Get in the Content Game with TikTok Series ‘Nine Innings to Love’

Imagine the late, great Harry Carey’s voice doing color commentary during the action in a romantic comedy show.
Ever since I found out the one baseball team I care about, the Chicago Cubs, is getting in the scripted content game with a series called Nine Innings to Love, I can’t imagine anyone but him breathlessly describing the goings-on in a love story set at Wrigley Field.
The series will playout via 17 short-form videos on the venerable team’s TikTok account, and per the show’s official description, it will tell the story of “Ava (Veronica Garrubbo), an aspiring romance writer in a slump, and David (Sid Kutikkad), a sweet but love-shy seatmate who does not believe romance is real, over the course of one Cubs game. After an accidental bleacher meet-cute leaves them stuck together for the game, Ava makes David a promise: before the final out, she will help him find a summer fling inside Wrigley Field. But as Ava turns the ballpark into a rom-com training ground, complete with swings and misses, a makeover, a returning ex and a ninth-inning chase, she starts to realize the story she has been trying to write may be happening right in front of her.”
Imagine good old Harry reading that logline.
You can click below to watch the teaser now playing on the official TikTok site.
From the looks of it, each episode will take place over the course of a half-inning, so I’ll go out on a limb and say that the Cubbies are going to win at home by the end of Nine Innings, so even if things go awry for Ava and David, there will still be a happy ending for fans.
The series was directed by Adam Sobel and created and written by the Cubs’ creative arm, Cubs Productions, with production services provided by Chicago’s Coyote Sun Productions. The series will also star Angelina Dávila, Kevin Kantor, Shelby Brown and Cole Steeves.
“The inspiration for ‘Nine Innings to Love’ came from a simple truth about the Wrigley Field Budweiser Bleachers: with general admission seating, you never know who might end up beside you. That felt like the perfect starting point for a love story,” Adam Sobel, the Cubs director of content and production, said in a press release. “In Ava and David, we wanted to create characters relatable to bleacher fans who come to the ballpark both for the game and for the possibility of what might happen off the field.”
While the series itself doesn’t look especially groundbreaking, the fact that a major league sports team is going the creative route with original content could be a revolution of sorts, one that isn’t limited to sports stories. Perhaps this inauspicious beginning will lead to more…imagine an exciting adventure about the heist of the Colonel’s secret recipe, or perhaps a drama set during the Cola Wars of the 1980s. They could really amp up the hostilities between Coke and Pepsi in the high-stakes battle to be America’s favorite carbonated beverage.
Corporations are people, after all, with all the attendant drama and heartbreak they create, with an infinite number of stories to tell.


