In Cooperstown, New York, a quest to get into baseball ends up being beaten up in the Wood Bat Factory’s batting cage.
Getting hit by a baseball
Yeeeeeouch. It seems that baseball isn’t quite for complete wusses after all. The fastball crunches into my finger and thumb, and I immediately throw the bat down in order to shake my hand about and do a few swears.
The balls are coming in at 60 miles per hour. Crashing into fingernails, that’s more than fast enough thank you. But it’s nowhere near as fast as major league pitches.
The batting cages of Cooperstown
The second leg of my quest to get into baseball was about playing the game. Near the baseball stadium in Cooperstown, New York, are the Wood Bat Factory’s batting cages. Essentially, you can rock up and pay to have the sort of machines that proper baseball players would use hurl balls at you. You stand there, swing and hopefully thwack the things hard into the back netting.
Baseball pitching speeds
But first up is a test that no man with the faintest streak of testosterone in his body seems able to resist. Boys really, really like seeing how fast they can throw something. And thus a radar-measured test of pitching speed has a magnetic lure.
Cunningly, they’ve broken down records by age group. The best anyone in my age group has managed today is 64 miles per hour (although clearly a professional has been in and clocked 94 earlier in the month).
I get five goes, hurling with full might into the back netting, and the best I can manage is 51 miles per hour. A later Google vanity check shows that ten-year-old little league pitchers would be pretty unimpressed with that. The technique clearly needs some work.
Baseball batting for cricketers
Standing in the batting cages is a very odd experience for someone more accustomed to a cricket bat. The ball seems to arrive roughly as quickly as I’ve faced before, but the angles are all wrong. The ball doesn’t bounce, the bat is held horizontally behind me, and missing a straight one isn’t an utter disaster.
The different cages offer different speeds and styles of delivery. Oddly, the fastball is easiest. Aside from the one that makes me do girly whimpers as it hits my fingers, I at least make contact with all ten machine pitches. I’ve no idea whether any of them would be legal shots or not, but two go flying as intended. I’ll call them home runs because no-one else is there to dispute it. The rest are a fine array of cover drives, cuts, pulls through mid-wicket and top edges that could take anyone behind me’s teeth out.
It feels good until I learn that Major League pitchers tend to send their fastballs down at around 95 miles per hour. Ouch. Good luck even seeing that.
Different baseball pitches
It’s in the other cages that the appeal of baseball finally clicks. There I face 40mph right hand overhand curve balls, 55mph knuckle balls and 50mph sliders. They’re much harder to deal with, partly because they move around and partly because you feel like you’re not getting your money’s worth unless you swing at them, even when they’re clearly going out of the zone.
But the idea that you can do so many things with the ball, and that there’s strategy and psychology to it, appeals to me. It’s something that, if I put the effort in, I could probably get into.
As for the batting cages, there’s something oddly addictive about them. A bit like mini golf courses. The next time I drive past one, I suspect I may be drawn in…
