Justin Wrobleski: On the Rise

Long before Intake met professional left-hander Justin Wrobleski, he had already made the product part of his nightly routine. We wanted to understand why - and learn more about the winding path, disciplined preparation and quiet self-belief behind his rise.

The most interesting athlete partnerships do not begin with a pitch. They begin with a discovery.

Justin Wrobleski was already a longtime Intake user when we first connected with him. He was not trying the product for a campaign or learning how to talk about it for a camera. Intake was simply one of the things he packed, used and replaced immediately if he ever left it behind.

That made us curious. Not only about the product, but about the person using it.

So we sat down with Justin to talk about where he came from, the setbacks that shaped him, the routines that keep him ready and what it feels like to build a career in a game where so much remains outside your control.

Watch On The Rise with Justin Wrobleski.

The Mound Is His Place

Ask Justin whether he feels more nervous in front of a camera or walking toward the mound, and he does not hesitate.

That certainty was earned slowly.

Justin was born outside Chicago and moved to Georgia when he was six. He remembers arriving as the last pick in recreational baseball because nobody knew who he was. Before long, he had become one of the best players around him. By college, he was good enough to earn a weekend starting role as a freshman at Clemson - a significant responsibility for a young pitcher.

But the experience did not unfold the way he imagined.

Justin remembers leaving games believing he had pitched well enough to build on, only to come away feeling as though nothing he did measured up.

He was moved to the bullpen, left off the traveling roster and eventually told he was not a fit for the school. From there came the junior-college route, a broken jaw that required his mouth to be wired shut, a move to Oklahoma State, a torn UCL and Tommy John surgery.

Each time his career seemed to be moving forward, something interrupted it.

Still, the arm was there. Los Angeles selected him in the 11th round of the 2021 draft while he was recovering from surgery. He made his major-league debut on July 7, 2024. In 2025, after moving between levels and roles, he became a meaningful postseason contributor during a championship run. By the following summer, he was a first-time All-Star. His official player biography and career timeline are available through MLB.

Preparation Before Confidence

Justin does not describe confidence as a personality trait. To him, it is evidence: the feeling that follows when the work has already been done.

On a start day, his schedule runs almost to the minute. If first pitch is at 7:10, he knows when he will stretch, enter the hot tub, begin throwing and reach the bullpen. On the drive to the field, Christian music helps slow him down. Once he arrives, Lil Wayne helps bring the energy back up.

The individual choices matter, but there is no single superstition holding everything together.

“It’s not necessarily one ritual,” he explains in the film. “It’s just sticking to what I know works for me and the timings that I know work for me.”

That process creates the calm people see on the mound. By game time, he is no longer searching for answers. He is carrying out a plan.

His broader philosophy is just as direct:

That idea became especially important as Justin moved between starting and relief roles, the major leagues and the minors, active rosters and long stretches of waiting. During the 2025 postseason, teammates and coaches kept giving him the same instruction: stay ready.

Eventually, the opportunity arrived. Justin went from watching teammates celebrate to pitching important World Series innings - exactly the kind of moment for which preparation exists.

The Work Away From the Field

A starting pitcher’s job is defined by brief, highly visible appearances separated by days of less visible work: recovery, mobility, strength training, mechanical adjustments, film study and sleep.

For Justin, sleep began moving to the center of that process around 2020. His jaw injury made breathing impossible to ignore. With his mouth wired shut and a deviated septum making nasal breathing difficult, he began reading about sleep, monitoring his own data and experimenting with ordinary nasal strips.

They helped to a point, but they also fell off and cut up his nose.

Then he saw Intake online.

The discovery was unremarkable in the best possible way: the product looked like a good idea, so he tried it. It worked for him, and he kept using it.

Intake did not become the whole story. It became one dependable piece of a much larger system - alongside training, timing, recovery work and the mental discipline required to begin again every few days.

That is also what made Justin’s experience meaningful to us. He did not present breathing as a shortcut to performance. He understood it as part of sleep, and sleep as part of recovery. In a career decided at the margins, the small things are rarely small.

On the Rise

Justin’s path has never been straight. That may be why he is careful not to treat any one arrival - a debut, a championship or an All-Star selection - as the end of it.

“This is only going to be a small portion of my life, this whole baseball thing,” he says near the end of the film. “So, try to do whatever I can to make the most of it and work as hard as I can to kind of reach my ceiling and just enjoy it.”

For now, the work continues: prepare, recover, stay ready and take the opportunity when it comes.

Intake happens to be part of that routine. We are proud that he found us before we found him.