Nick Stewart’s frustration escalated with each pitch.

There weren’t runners on base in the bottom of the seventh while he was clinging to a lead. This wasn’t a game and there was no batter in the box.

“I was like, ‘Why the heck am I throwing 83 [mph]?” James Madison’s 6-foot-5, right-handed junior pitcher recalled. “‘But then I can go out on a Saturday and throw 93?’ So I was wondering what was going on.”

It was after Stewart’s freshman season, he said, when the Dukes began equipping their baseball program with technology on par or better than what their competition across Division I and in the Colonial Athletic Association were using.

And that day Stewart, who is expected to anchor the JMU pitching rotation as the No. 1 starter this season, was his first throwing as Rapsodo – an informational device capable of measuring velocity, spin rate, horizontal break, vertical break, and beyond – tracked each of Stewart’s pitches during a bullpen session.

“At first, I was even trying to throw as hard as I can,” Stewart said with a laugh, “and it just wouldn’t come out, because I didn’t have the same adrenaline I have in a game. I didn’t really like it. I felt like it was weird, and once it got in my head and I saw that 83, I wasn’t even paying attention to the rest of the numbers.”

Stewart said he’s since grown to enjoy all the data at his disposal, and Dukes associate head coach Jimmy Jackson added even though he and fifth-year JMU skipper Marlin Ikenberry like to know all the numbers, they don’t force their players live religiously by them.

Jackson, who works with pitchers and was promoted Tuesday, said it’s why he didn’t have a problem covering the area showing velocity during Stewart’s subsequent bullpens in order for the pitcher to concentrate on what he actually wanted to work on.

“You don’t want to paralyze them mentally,” Ikenberry said, “and then have them try to redo everything. You want to give them certain points of what they do well and how they can improve, and you got to be fragile in conversations with guys and then see how they feel about things they’re doing.

“When we recruit and get guys, we try not to make a lot of changes with ‘em. As I always say, ‘They’re here for a reason, they’re good players.’ We just enhance it by giving them the data.”

And JMU has plenty of it to give, beginning with Rapsodo for its pitchers and hitters. Hitters have Blast Motion, too, and the coaching staff uses Synergy when it preps for opponents. Additionally, Jackson videos all of his pitchers from a variety of angles, so they can see every mechanical step in their delivery.

Jackson said between Rapsodo and his pitchers’ understanding of how to use the video properly, it’s allowed the Dukes to remain consistent from one year to another on the mound.

In 2019, JMU topped the CAA with a 3.69 ERA, yielded 436 hits, the fewest in the conference, and had four pitchers selected in the MLB Draft off of the squad.

Since Ikenberry and Jackson arrived in 2016, the Dukes’ team ERA has dropped each season.

“Where I think a lot of this technology helps us is,” Jackson said, “as opposed to Coach Ike or myself, saying ‘Man this kid has two breaking balls and they look so similar. Which one is better?’ Or even our if hitters are telling us, ‘I thought it was the same pitch.’ [Rapsodo] will tell us the exact break in both directions.”

Jackson said identifying strengths with one pitch and weaknesses in another can elevate a pitcher’s repertoire if he can aid that pitcher in figuring out what works, what doesn’t and how to change based on what the information dictates.

“We had a really good freshman this fall,” Jackson said, “who had a really good curve and a really good slider in every single bullpen, but Rapsodo was reading different numbers and telling us they were definitely different pitches just like our eyes were telling us.

“Then we get into the [intrasquad] game, and with the Rapsodo numbers, those two pitches became merged into one and it’s just in a game, because there’s more adrenaline and he’s throwing harder. So we found out, no, he was just throwing one really good slider and half the time he thought was throwing a curveball. So I’d call curve and it’d read on Rapsodo that it matched up perfectly to his slider, so it gave us that instead of me just giving an opinion.”

Shelton Perkins, who struck out 72 hitters and posted a 2.96 ERA in 45 2/3 innings last year for the Dukes before being drafted by the Baltimore Orioles in the 16th round, said Jackson’s ability to educate pitchers is how pitchers at JMU collectively have only bettered since the arrival of Ikenberry and Jackson. Perkins said he’s spent the offseason in Harrisonburg training with Jackson, in preparation for Orioles minor league camp next month in Sarasota, Fla.

Jackson said Perkins had the best breaking ball in all of the CAA last season because he understood how to use his elite spin rate to his advantage.

“It is unbelievable the way Jimmy teaches that kind of stuff,” Perkins said, “and really relays the message through the numbers. I’m really not great with numbers, but he’s able to find a way to somehow help me understand everything I need to do with the numbers to help me get big-league hitters out, and that’s the goal.”

According to Stewart, Jackson can relate to any of the pitchers on the Dukes’ roster, too, which allows him and his teammates to feel comfortable whether they care about spin rate, want to know about it, don’t want to or simply just have the desire to get the opposing hitter out.

“I think he understands the personality of each pitcher since he spends so much time with us,” Stewart said. “We take personality tests to find out whether we’re a visual learner or [auditory] learner, and I think that plays into how he coaches us and he gets to know us."

Junior pitcher Justin Showalter agreed, and he wasn’t exposed to advanced analytics until his JMU career began.

Showalter will likely help the Dukes in their rotation this season.

“My freshman year I added a curveball to pair with my slider,” Showalter, a Turner Ashby graduate, said. “And I’d say the technology has helped, because without it I think it’d be hard to tell if I’m throwing my curveball differently than I’m throwing my slider. It gives me the ability to see how I’m going to make the separation between the two pitches.”

Similarly to information Rapsodo spits out, the video Jackson shoots of his pitchers is always available to them.

Jackson said he typically takes video on his iPhone from four different angles – behind the mound, the catcher’s point of view, the third-side side and first-base side – and edits it in iMovie before meeting with his pitchers.

“Depending on where you’re standing, depends on how things look and it’s the same thing with video,” Jackson said. “In a perfect world, we’d have four cameras working, all the angles at the same exact time of the same exact pitch and then we could get a 360 view. We don’t have the capabilities right now, but I can take a video from each of those angles and even though it’s not exactly the same pitch, you move pretty similar if you throw four of the same pitches in a row.

“Now these guys watching video of themselves, some love it and need to see it all the time, but everyone at least wants to watch it and realizes, ‘This is what we we’re talking about on the field and now that I see it, I think it get it.’”

And that’s how Stewart came to recognize the value of Rapsodo.

Rated as the ninth-best MLB Draft prospect in the CAA for 2020 by Baseball America, Stewart, said he’s anxious to lead the pitching staff beginning with Friday’s opener at N.C. State. Over 72 1/3 innings last season, Stewart was 4-5 with a 2.74 ERA.

“I can throw a pitch now,” Stewart said, “look at Rapsodo and figure out that was a bad pitch and I need to turn my hand a quarter of an axis away to make it a completely different pitch.

“I think evolving and learning it more has helped me be able to realize my vertical carry on fastballs, learn where my slider needs to be and feel out when I feel something different in my hand. I can see when it’s a bad pitch and if I switch to this, I can flip my hand over a little and make it have more vertical break. It’s learning the numbers and feeling how to adjust.”