Afraid this is only relevant to folks in the SF Bay Area; however, I think it may be worth mentioning.

All of us have spent countless hours hitting off of Iron Mikes or similar pitching machines, right? Great for training swing mechanics, but pretty much useless for correlating mechanics with swing timing...

My son and I were blown away when we recently found Terry Whitfield's low-key facility in Burlingame, called FuturePro. They have three cages with life-sized LED pitchers (2 RHPs and 1 LHP) who go through a full pitching motion and then a real-looking ball is shot from a hidden machine--it appears to come right out of the pitcher's hand. These machines have 3 different speed settings, topping out in the low 80's, and because the balls look like real baseballs you can see the spin. Unfortunately those machines don't seem to serve up curves, only FBs, but still--timing your swing mechanics to the pitcher's motion and the realistic ball are mind-blowing advances for batting cage practice.

What truly amazed me is that Terry's rates are if anything a little cheaper than many batting cages--you can rent by the 1/2 hour, 1 hour, or $3 per 20 balls.

The facility is located over at 1704 Rollins Road in Burlingame and Terry and his partner, Ed Ricks, are very generous with their advice to guys that use their cages. They give lessons too, but these guys are baseball people far more than businessmen...a great place to hang out, talk baseball, practice baseball, etc.

My son's team sometimes practices on Pro Batter. We program a sequence set of twenty pitches of various pitches and speeds. What I thought was interesting is even though the hole never moves, my son said facing a lefty looks completely different than a righty even on a fastball.

That looks like a very cool machine, TG. In fact, if you can get different pitch types out of it then that's even better than what the FuturePro guys have.

One other interesting detail, the FuturePro machines are set up permanently as either RHPs or LHPs.

Anyway, SF Bay Area folks would be smart to check out Terry's place in Burlingame--I've never seen a Pro Batter machine in person (maybe the Giants and A's can afford these amenities but if so they certainly don't make them available to the public...)

By the way, thank you very much for your nice welcome note. I replied to you briefly, but I did it wrong and sent the reply back to the website administrator by mistake.

In any case, it is very nice to be here and I owe it to you in a round-about way. I would probably never have heard of this place if it weren't for a couple of those threads at eteamz in which you were looking in the rear-view mirror on the way out.

Some friends opened a facilty and bought a Pro Batter. They're 20K. In February my son will be on it a couple of times a week facing breaking stuff with a few fastballs mixed in to keep him honest. Maybe the fastballs should be up and in to keep him real honest.

ha! According to the price list on the Pro Batter websiter those suckers start at about $20K...looks like you could spend 3x that amount pretty easily, if you've got lots of discretionary cash laying around the house.