Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I am eager to return to the field for a fresh episode of Big Windup!, as our boys continue preparations for the first round of the summer tournament. Having secured a matchup against last year’s eventual winners, their practice regimen has been appropriately grueling, involving pre-dawn wakeups, drills into the night, and a thoughtful combination of physical and mental conditioning.
Most sports shows offer some manner of engagement with the psychological underpinnings of their leads’ behavior, whether it’s something as simple as “I have to fulfill my father’s dying wish” or a nuanced array of emotional factors. But Big Windup! is somewhat unique in that it treats our base impulses as simply more muscles to be trained, with instincts like “tensing up during key plays” countered through persistent meditation and Pavlovian implanted associations. And all of this training is uniquely appropriate for a game like baseball, with its almost “turn-based” combination of passive stretches and frantic action.
Great sports writers have long understood that the science and strategy of baseball makes it a natural facilitator of Hunter x Hunter-reminiscent chess matches, wherein the efficacy of certain training regimens or strategic gambits can be made brutally apparent through close attention to the ebb and flow of conflict. I’m eager to see how our boys’ training pays off, so let’s get right to the action!