The Past On Deck : A Trip to the Batting Cages Can Be a Trip Down Memory Lane

The batter stepped to the plate and pawed at the ground with his right foot. He adjusted his helmet and flicked his bat at the pitcher, his fingers tightening, then relaxing around the handle. The first pitch was low and outside, but the second came in straight and true, belt-high. The batter tensed, then swung forcefully and met the ball with a solid thunk, launching it toward the horizon.

The ball’s flight, however, came to an abrupt end less than 60 feet from home plate. A giant net had ensnarled the sphere, bringing it to a halt just inches before it would have slammed into the side of the home and working office of a tarot-card and palm reader who possesses, according to the sign, ESP.

The batter savored for only a moment the satisfaction of a ball well-struck, then brought his 33-ounce club back above his shoulder and awaited the next delivery. The pitcher showed no emotion about being taken deep, all the way to the ESP warning track.

The pitcher, of course, never showed emotion about anything, being a mass of metal arms and rubber rollers and nuts and bolts. The pitcher was a machine, transformed from this collection of hardware and electrical wires into a pitcher simply by the insertion of four quarters by the batter.

For this small sum, the pitcher would deliver between 15 and 20 near-perfect pitches, never slowing down, never stopping and never complaining of injury or storming off the field in a childish huff because a teammate had put something disgusting on the inside of his cap.

This was a world of automated batting cages, where kids dream of becoming the next Willie Mays.

The most common scene at any of the handful of batting facilities around the Valley is a group of youngsters gathered around a cage with bats and batting gloves, unlaced high-top sneakers rising up the leg nearly to the bottom of surfer-type bathing suits, and flowered shirts that would make Don Ho blush.

They take turns swatting at the pitches, darting in and out of the cages with handfuls of quarters, some having obviously become much more proficient at it than others. But always there is talk and laughter, good-natured criticism of each other’s efforts. One youngster peered through the chain-link fence into the cage marked “70 MPH” and watched his friend’s unsuccessful attempts to hit the swift pitches. When the friend’s allotment of baseballs had been exhausted, the young man offered his opinion.

“That was great,” he said. “Wanna give your seeing-eye dog a chance now?”

Both boys laughed, their young skin seemingly tough enough to deflect this kind of barb.

Groups of adults come in, too, guys in their 20s and 30s who play in softball leagues and take it all very seriously, using the cages specifically for batting practice, nothing more or less. They talk and chatter much as the youngsters do. Except that they swear a lot.

But there is another type who wanders through. A group with a much smaller membership list. For these people, the cages are a place of reawakening, a place to come to work out the aches and pains and kinks and laughable lack of timing brought on by 20 years of inactivity. A transformation from a decade or more of thinking a real workout was mowing the lawn and edging it with a weed whacker all in the same weekend, and now finding themselves signed up for a softball league and wondering whether they will pull a groin muscle in the first game or the second.

For some, a trip to the batting cages is a trip back in time--to a time when they were youngsters, romping through a summer with no more concerns or worries than the mechanical pitcher they now face.

Vinnie Ginnetti remembers. He is a 58-year-old Mocha Mix salesman now, the area sales manager actually, and he comes to the cages frequently, sometimes during a lunch break. He is lean and fit and he wears dark slacks and loafers and an Oscar de la Renta necktie. And a batting glove.

Ginnetti, who lives in Woodland Hills, plays in a seniors softball league and says he comes to the cages just to keep his timing intact. He puts his quarters into the machine and almost immediately softballs are lobbed toward him. His swing is short and crisp and he drives softball after softball on a line into the netting. He says he does it so he can keep playing softball and keep helping his team.

But during these sessions Ginnetti cannot help it when his mind wanders. It wanders sometimes all the way back to Illinois. All the way back to 1946, when he was 16 and the nation was piecing itself together in the aftermath of World War II . . . when he was the starting second baseman for Joliet Township High near Chicago and his team was playing nearby Gardner High for the conference championship.

“It was tied in the bottom of the ninth and there were two out,” Ginnetti recalls, the excitement of it even now lighting up his face. “We had a guy on third base and I’m up and here he comes toward home. I laid down a perfect squeeze bunt and we won the game.”

Ginnetti is crouched in a stance now, his aluminum bat in his hands, demonstrating how he slid his right hand down the barrel of the bat in a flash and dropped the game-winning bunt.

“That was a pretty exciting moment,” he said. “Hell, it must have been. It’s 42 years later and I still remember it. But baseball is like that. The memories, they stick with you for a long time. Forever, I guess.”

Ginnetti is gone now, back in the cages, some clinks of his metal bat against the softball perhaps only reminding him that he is still in good shape and can still put the bat on the ball. Other clinks, perhaps, send him flashing back to postwar America, to Joliet and to a childhood that can, for four quarters, be momentarily revived.

A parade of youngsters walk by the softball cages at Batters Up in Canoga Park, pulling on their batting gloves and dragging their bats as they breeze past Ginnetti and head down to the baseball cages. They don’t know it, but they are making their own memories this night.

Jim Bellew, 48, of Sylmar has his memories locked away, memories of the thrill of high school baseball. He was the starting right fielder for Carmichael High near Sacramento in his senior year. He made no all-conference teams and attracted no major league scouts. But that did not matter.

“You can never forget that excitement, of being 18 and playing ball,” Bellew said as he took a break from the World Series cages in Granada Hills. “I remember looking at the clock every 10 minutes during school on the day of the game, then rushing over to the gym to get dressed. We had no crowds at our games, really, just family and friends. But it felt like the whole world was watching.

“I come here to keep my timing for softball, but I think about my high school team sometimes. I remember how it was. I remember the goose bumps the day of the game. There isn’t much to get goose bumps about anymore.”

Some memories are at the same time happy and sad. Louis Daige has plenty of old memories. As he takes a few slow and measured swings in a softball cage, one memory is more vivid than all the others. And much more painful. Daige, 51, is an auto mechanic living in Valencia. His wife, Marta, died in 1986. The same Marta that he went groggy over in the spring of 1955 when they met at Morristown High in New Jersey.

“I played ball in high school and she came to a game with me,” he said. “She just sat there and cheered. I don’t think back then she knew what she was cheering for or anything. But I always knew she was there. I remember always looking up in the stands to see her, and hoping the coach wasn’t watching me.”

Daige wears white leather sneakers, a blue sweat shirt and blue jeans. He, too, wears a batting glove, and you wonder why a guy who spends eight hours a day smashing his knuckles against carburetors and scorching the flesh off his fingers on hot engine manifolds needs any protection from the rubber grip of a softball bat. It is, he explains, not for protection. It’s just to get a better grip on the bat.

Daige wore no batting glove when he played in 1955. And the bats, well, aluminum was still used mostly for boats and airplanes then.

“I remember one game,” he said. “I struck out twice, I think. Maybe three times. I really felt bad. Like the end of the world, you know? Then, after the game ended, Marta came over and hugged me. We’d been going together about six months by then. She just hugged me. She said something, but I don’t really remember what. Something like, ‘That’s OK.’ But I always remember that hug. It made me feel so good. When I hit softballs now, anytime I can swing the bat really, I think about that day.

“That was a long time ago.”