Out of nowhere to some extent, the Wake Forest baseball program is ranked number one in America this year coming off a ride to the national title game last year.
What is going on? How did this happen? They’ve been good for decades but not THIS good.
Word is all this success is rooted in a special indoor pitching facility that has dramatically improved the performance of Wake Forest pitchers. Baseball 101: When you have the best pitchers you’re likely to win a lot of baseball games.
So what is behind that pitching room curtain? Oz? A hypnotist?
Maybe they’re prompting ChatGPT with questions such as “What is the perfect way to pitch a baseball that will lead to more strikeouts, fewer hits, and a run to the College World Series national championship?
The tool scans everything on the Internet, which is a lot of information, and spits out, sort of like a baseball player spits on the field, a simple, concise answer. Wake’s pitchers follow that deeply researched advice and hitters can’t hit their pitches. The wisdom of the Internet makes hitting a baseball difficult, apparently.
Or maybe there’s something in that surreptitious pitching joint involving robots. Answers to all our questions now and moving ahead will probably involve robots. College baseball will not be exempt from this technological tidal wave.
Behind the curtain there could be a robot pitcher, sporting a silvery metal physique and no emotions, instructing pitchers how to use the perfect throwing motion that leads to unhittable pitches. Wake pitchers spend hours each day fine-tuning their pitching motion so it becomes as close to robotic perfect which is formidable.
They also ask the silver savant questions such as “How do you throw a split-fingered fastball” and the robot immediately demonstrates that with a perfect motion based on algorithmic instructions and calculus. Pitchers mimic that demo because they know the robot’s motion is perfect and they want to pitch perfectly. All pitchers want that since the sport was created in the 1890s or so.
Of course, this robot theory could be way off. Maybe there’s some Phil Jackson Zen-like incense in the pitching room where the pitchers sit around Indian style and practice meditation and mindfulness picturing themselves breaking off 12 to 6 o’clock curveballs that no one can get a bat on. Eyes closed, they draw further into themselves, get more in touch with their feelings, and understand why they have been put on this Earth.
Then again, it may just be something less mechanical and self-absorbing, something more inspirational. Could it be Tony Robbins has been hired to teach the pitchers how to be in a positive state by learning about the power of the mind to be stronger than the body and slamming down the chute any contradictory theories? Is it plausible that in the facility Tony, doing undercover work not even found out by the Winston-Salem Journal, demands the pitchers walk over fire pits in bare feet to show them they can place their feet on flames without melting them, and therefore pounds home the message, using a fist punch motion to illustrate, that they can pitch great no matter how many guys are on base or who is at the plate?
Does Tony convince them they can become immune to an inferno burning on the field with, say, the bases loaded and no outs, and use their minds and their robot muscle memory and machine learning ChatGPT powers to snap off a screwball no one can touch?
This Wake Forest pitching facility is shrouded in mystery and mystique. Sammy Sportface would like to get a peak at the facility to taste the secret sauce, then root for the team to win the national championship so he and his friends can have one last hurrah in Omaha this June at the College World Series.
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