Will Ray scrolled back a few years through his iPhone's camera roll and landed on a video of the moment that revived his baseball career.

At face value, the 10-second clip from March 16, 2022, is unremarkable. Standing on the mound at Wake Forest’s training facility, Ray winds up and uncorks his hardest fastball. As the ball snaps into the catcher’s mitt, someone pipes up from behind the camera: “That was kinda slow, bro.”

The voice is Danny Corona, one of Ray’s teammates at Wake Forest. Corona and Ray had made a friendly wager over whether Ray, then an outfielder, could throw a pitch faster than 90 miles per hour. Corona bet Ray couldn’t. Ray bet he could. To Corona’s chagrin and surprise, the pitch clocked in at 90.4 mph with some carry.

Ray hadn’t pitched since middle school, but the movement of his toss impressed the small group of teammates watching a monitor with data from TrackMan, the radar technology that can instantly analyze the metrics of a pitch.

“Everyone was like, 'Oh s--t, you might have something,'” Ray said.

Two years after winning the bet with Corona, Ray is at a drastically different place in his baseball career. He was one of Wake Forest’s most prolific relief pitchers this past spring, making 33 appearances with a 3.68 ERA.

This summer, he’s suiting up for the Brewster Whitecaps in the Cape Cod Baseball League, taking another step to elevate his pitching success to new heights.

Ray was a freshman at the time of the bet, about one month into his first season with the Demon Deacons. He wasn’t playing much, only logging the occasional appearance as a defensive replacement or pinch-runner.

He kept pitching after practices out of curiosity. Wake Forest ace Rhett Lowder, who went on to become the seventh overall pick in the 2023 MLB Draft, would set up post-practice bullpen sessions for Ray. The more reps he gained, the more convinced he became that a switch to pitching would be his best course of action, his ticket to the next level.

After honing his pitching technique in Lowder-run bullpen sessions during his freshman spring, Ray first tried his hand at in-game pitching with the Auburn Doubledays of the Perfect Game Collegiate Baseball League in the summer of 2022.

The results reaffirmed his growing interest in switching positions: Ray shut down hitters on the mound with a 1.50 ERA in 18 innings of work. At the plate, though, nothing seemed to be working.

Frustrated with his hitting slump, he called Wake Forest head coach Tom Walter and asked for permission to become a full-time pitcher the following season. In retrospect, Ray considers it an “impulsive decision.”

“I might have pulled the trigger too soon, but I did it during summer ball when I was kind of down,” Ray said. “I was just like, ‘I think I want to go full time on it,’ because I was throwing the ball really well.”

Walter wasn’t sold on the idea.

“I’m not going to stop you from doing something you want to do,” he told Ray. “But that’s not what we recruited you to do.”

Walter and his coaching staff waited until that fall when they could evaluate Ray’s pitching back on campus. When the time came, there was one issue: Ray couldn’t get anyone out.

“Candidly, he threw terrible,” Wake Forest pitching coach Corey Muscara said. “He had kind of lost all that carry … the secondary stuff wasn’t very good. He just had a very poor fall.”

When Walter met with Ray, the head coach was brutally honest.

“You can’t really pitch here,” Walter told him. “We didn’t recruit you to pitch. You’re not really a pitcher right now — you just throw the ball. If you want to be a pitcher, you should probably consider going elsewhere, because this isn’t gonna fly here.”

Ray entered the transfer portal at the halfway point of the season, unsure of his next step. He considered a few other schools but returned to Wake Forest in hopes of working his way into the Demon Deacons’ bullpen.

The pivotal moment arrived a few days later. During a pitchers’ fielding practice drill, Ray scooped up a double play ball at the mound and slung it sidearm to the second baseman. It was a ‘eureka’ moment for Muscara, who stopped the drill as soon as he saw the play.

“You’re throwing from there from now on,” Muscara told Ray. “We might be able to get something out of this.”

Up until that point, Ray had been throwing from a traditional overhand arm slot, the same way most outfielders toss to the infield after fielding a base hit. But the sidearm motion came naturally to Ray, partially because he had spent some time playing third base in high school, using the sidewinding motion to throw grounders to first base.

With little hesitation, he agreed to adjust.

“That takes a lot of trust,” said Camden Minacci, Ray’s best friend and a former standout reliever at Wake Forest. “That can be a tough pill to swallow, especially when he’s worked, even if it's just for a month or two, throwing over the top, working on throwing over the top, and then that plan was proposed.”

The day after Muscara made his suggestion, he and Ray were back in Wake Forest’s pitching lab to revamp the secondary arsenal behind Ray’s primary pitch, a two-seam fastball with some natural arm-side carry. Muscara taught him a cutter-slider hybrid, which Ray picked up within a week.

With those two pitches, Ray solidified himself a spot as a righty-on-righty specialist in Wake Forest’s bullpen in the 2022 season, tossing 11 2/3 innings in 19 appearances with a 5.40 ERA. During that season, Muscara encouraged Ray to stay loose on the mound, keeping the perspective that he had already beaten the odds by breaking into Wake Forest’s bullpen.

“He performs at his best when he’s more loosey-goosey, a little more relaxed, kind of flowing out there,” Muscara said. “As opposed to trying to rip everything as hard as he can, trying to strike everybody out.”

In one outing against Coastal Carolina, Ray found himself in a late jam in a close game. Muscara walked out for a mound visit and offered Ray some reassurance.

“You’re playing with house money, man,” Muscara told him. “You’re not supposed to even be here right now.”

The next game, Muscara noticed Ray was using a different walk-up song as he ran out to the mound from the bullpen. A few seconds later, the opening lyrics of Eminem’s “Cinderella Man” boomed through the speaker:

You know, technically, I’m not even supposed to really be here right now…

Ray pointed and winked at Muscara in the dugout, who burst into hysterical laughter.

That ‘house money’ mentality was a big part of Ray’s success over the next calendar year. The Mars, Pennsylvania, native spent the following summer with the Nashua Silver Knights of the Futures Collegiate Baseball League, serving as the team’s closer for seven appearances and 13 innings.

He followed it up with a breakout spring at Wake Forest in 2023 and was the Demon Deacons' "best reliever all year," according to Muscara.

He’s thriving with the Whitecaps so far this summer, allowing just one earned run through his first five innings on the Cape. The numbers look nice, but to Muscara, results are secondary to development, improvement and, of course, fun.

“I want him to enjoy himself, I want him to be healthy, I want him to have fun and I want him to explore different pitches that he can execute that maybe aren’t in his arsenal right now,” Muscara said.

For Ray, that might look like mixing in more four-seam fastballs up in the zone or experimenting with a splitter — which he has been learning recently. He’s pitching pressure-free, trying things out and seeing what works.

He’s playing with house money. After all, he’s not even supposed to be here right now.

Title photo credit to Julianne Shivers.