USC baseball plays its first game in the 2026 NCAA Tournament this weekend against the Texas State Bobcats. Want to learn more about Texas State baseball? Station KXAN took a deeper look inside the program:
“The Bobcats’ associate head coach, Josh Blakley, handles pitching. He’s seen the game of baseball and how it’s analyzed change drastically over his time in the sport.
“’It wasn’t even a thought process when I played,’ said Blakley. ‘The first 12-plus years I coached it was like voodoo magic that people were even thinking about this stuff.’
“He’s referencing analytics in baseball and how they can impact the game in how it’s viewed and analyzed. The Bobcats are one of the many programs leaning into some of the new data available through systems like TrackMan.
“’It’s a shortcut,’ said Blakley. ‘What used to take you four months of throwing bullpens and four to five weeks of scrimmages and games to kind of get feedback from hitters on pitches. Now you can look at an iPad and get an answer in 15 seconds.’
“So what type of data is being collected and how is it analyzed? The Bobcats have welcomed Austin Wallace as their director of pitching development and analytics. His playing career, which started in college at the University of Texas, only ended a couple of years ago. Despite that, he has a wealth of pitching knowledge that has been building for a long time.
“‘I wasn’t a guy with elite stuff,’ said Wallace about his ability as a pitcher. ‘I kind of always had to find my way around barrels and pitch backwards and pitch to my strengths and get the hitter guessing. I kind of always felt like I was more of a strategy-driven pitcher.’
“Wallace spent the 2025 baseball season with the Boston Red Sox, furthering his knowledge of pitching development and analysis. Now in his first season with Texas State, he’s made an immediate impact. Humbly talking about how he doesn’t have any coding skills, Wallace created an app for the Bobcats to gather and analyze data from practices and games.
“‘Kind of just a process of my bullying ChatGPT back and forth,’ Wallace jokes. Regardless of his coding chops, the impact of Wallace is clear for the Bobcats. The app and some of the new technology, like from TrackMan, spits out an incredible amount of data. That includes things like numbers depicting the induced vertical and horizontal break of certain pitches, how quickly they are spinning and the exact location.”
The science of Texas State goes up against the proven pitching of USC. It will be fascinating to see what the Trojans’ opponent brings to the diamond in the all-important first game of the College Station NCAA Regional.
This article originally appeared on Trojans Wire: USC baseball’s first opponent in NCAA Tournament leans into analytics
Reporting by Matt Zemek, Trojans Wire / Trojans Wire
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
