Technology

The International Knuckleball Academy’s Commitment to Objectively Analyzing Your Performance

You must do many things perfectly if you’re going to throw a successful knuckleball. For one thing, the ball itself needs to turn, just slightly, in the right direction. This small turn and other key elements of an effective knuckleball are elusive and hard to see, and can be even harder to understand.

That’s why the International Knuckleball Academy uses advanced and exclusive technology to communicate these elements objectively. No guesswork. No intuiting. Our training features The Contraption, an exclusively designed machine for tracking the ball’s flight. Super-slow-mo cameras follow the trajectory of the ball, capture the seams, count the rotations.

The bottom line: instant and objective feedback so you can hone your knuckleballing skills as swiftly as possibly.

This type of evaluation is unique to the IKA’s training regimen. You, your coaches, and others who evaluate your pitching prowess will now be able to observe just how little your ball spins, and exactly what path it is traveling, in minute, objective detail. No longer will you be at the mercy of the subjective judgment of a scout with scant if any technical means of analyzing your talent. The Contraption will serve the same purpose for knuckleballers that a radar gun serves for conventional pitchers.

At the IKA campus, the super-slow-motion cameras focus on the mound from multiple angles. Your personal approach to the knuckleball is broken down into many easily digestible pieces so that you can focus on making one adjustment at a time as you get instant and reliable feedback on each stage of your progress.

Never before has a baseball training program offered such an intimate and objective approach to the job of learning how to throw the knuckleball.

When we say you reinvent yourself here at the International Knuckleball Academy , we are not talking about some mysterious or un-analyzable process. Sure, there’s something inside of you that gets you here to begin with; we don’t have any machine to help you with that. Once you’re here, though, both our technology and our expertise help you to craft your knuckleball piece by piece, from the ground up─with the benefit of the most precise possible awareness of what you are accomplishing and how.

Hitting that thing is like trying to catch a butterfly with tweezers.

– Tim McCarver