Swing Away: How to Make Your Batting Cage Time Actually Count

Here is a scene we watch play out most weeks. A kid walks into the cages, loads up a Cage Card, steps into a tunnel, and proceeds to swing as hard as humanly possible at every single pitch for six straight rounds. Then everybody goes home. It was fun, and honestly there is nothing wrong with fun. But it was not practice. If you are going to drive out to New Berlin anyway, a little structure turns that same half hour into something that shows up in a Saturday box score.

We have been around Milwaukee-area baseball and softball for a while now, since 1881 if you want the long version, and we have seen a lot of cage sessions. Here is how the good ones tend to go.

Warm up in a standard tunnel, not on the good stuff

Your first round is not your best round. Nobody's is. Start in one of our three standard tunnels at a comfortable speed and use those first fifteen pitches to do nothing but make clean contact. No hero swings. You are getting your timing, your feet, and your eyes on the same page.

A standard round runs one credit, so a couple of warm-up rounds costs you very little and saves you from spending your sharpest swings on your stiffest body. Then bump the speed up once you feel like yourself again.

Give each round a job

This is the single biggest difference between hitters who improve in the cage and hitters who just sweat in it. Fifteen pitches is a nice, small container. Give it one assignment and stick to it.

• Round of oppo. Try to drive everything the other way. It forces you to let the ball travel.
• Round of line drives. Anything in the air over the machine, anything on the ground, does not count. Only the ones through the middle.
• Round with two strikes. Choke up, shorten it up, put every ball in play.
• One round of let it go. Because it is fun and because sometimes you just want to hit one.

Then let HitTrax tell you the truth

Everybody who has ever hit a ball knows the swing that felt beautiful and went straight into the ground. That is what our HitTrax tunnel is for. It reads the ball off your bat and puts exit velocity, launch angle, and projected distance right up on the screen, so you find out whether the adjustment you just made actually did anything.

Our advice on the numbers: watch your exit velocity, and mostly ignore everything else at first. Hitting the ball hard is the skill. Launch angle is useful as a mirror, not a target, and we would rather see a young hitter chase good contact than chase a number. A HitTrax round is two credits, which makes it a great way to close out a session once you have something worth measuring.

Bring the bat question with you

If you are between bats, or your player is growing out of one, we run the Demo House, our free bat and helmet borrow station. Grab a couple of demo bats, take real hits with each, and watch what HitTrax says about them. Two bats that read the same on a spec sheet can feel like completely different tools in a twelve-year-old's hands, and this is the only way to know which is which.

No appointment for any of it. The cages are walk-in, no reservations, on our Cage Card system, and you can swipe in any time we are open.

When to book the turf instead

Cages are for hitting. If what you actually need is ground balls, footwork, a full team practice, or somewhere indoors to run a tryout when Wisconsin is being Wisconsin, that is what our 7,500 square feet of indoor turf is for. The one thing to remember is the difference: cages are walk-in, turf is reservation-based.

Come take some swings

You do not need a training plan, a coach, or a big block of time. You need thirty focused minutes and a reason for each round. We will get you a Cage Card, point you at an open tunnel, and stay out of your way. And if you want a second set of eyes on something, ask. Somebody behind the counter has almost certainly hit in that same tunnel.

When you love baseball like we do, you can't beat Burghardt!

Running a team practice instead? Take a look at the Performance Center turf and get your reservation on the books.