Batter Up! : Lakewood Practice Cages Provide an Opportunity to Hone Skills or Play Out Major-League Fantasies

Kendrick Chipman, 6, was ready to hit at the new Lakewood Batting Cages. He wore a blue batting glove and a too-large helmet that framed his clenched lips and determined eyes. Though now a Yankee in a park league, he had on the shirt of his old team, the Padres.

With all his might, Kendrick swung left-handed at the brown polyurethane baseballs coming toward him at 35 m.p.h. He kept missing them.

Eager to help her son, Karen Chipman, who was standing outside the chain-link fence, would call out “Now!” as the machine’s iron arm released a ball. Still, Kendrick would swing and miss.

“I think the bat weighs more than he does,” Karen said.

Kendrick’s great but futile efforts neither exhausted nor irritated him. Wearing a uniform and just being in the cage were sufficient joys for the boy who idolizes Wally Joyner of the Angels, so he never stopped grinning.

“Since he’s been 2 years old, that’s all we hear . . . baseball,” his mother said.

The balls quit coming.

Kendrick stepped out of the cage and asked: “Hey, Mom, can I get in again?”

From a distance, the batting cages that opened recently on Paramount Boulevard at the edge of the Long Beach Airport seem like a construction site: an enclosed complex from which emanates a rattle of machinery and the constant clanks of what could pass for hammering.

The cages are covered by netting that rises like a circus big top.

Inside them, batters with metal bats face the specter of mysterious green pitching machines with “on” lights as ominous as alien red eyes. There is a choice of cages that offer baseballs at speeds up to 80 m.p.h. or softballs in slow-pitch arcs. Fourteen swings for 50 cents.

Ground balls bound over the green concrete floor of the cage. Like the jets that often scream overhead, line drives soar skyward--until they are stopped softly in mid-flight by the net, leaving to the imagination whether they could they have cleared some major-league fence.

Darrel Tyler, 47, owner of the cages and a former Little League coach, said a batting cage is the “best tool for a person who wants to learn how to hit.”

But not everyone who comes is a player. “For older people, I think it brings back childhood memories,” Tyler said.

Tyler was checking the rattling feeder tubes and sorting troughs during the noon hour Monday.

“The big thing,” he said of the machines, “is keeping them adjusted and oiled.”

The whole operation is computerized, in contrast to the early days of batting cages when boys would retrieve balls with buckets from 200-foot lots and reload the machines by hand. At Lakewood, the balls drain to a mechanism that automatically picks them up.

“There it is, that’s the ball you’ve got to crush.”

And so John Nuss, taking the advice of his father, crushed it.

John, 14, was in the 60 m.p.h. cage, working up a sweat.

But Dennis Nuss, 44, a truck driver who said he hopes John can become proficient enough at baseball to earn a college scholarship, said: “When I want him to really work and lose 20 pounds, he wants to go play video games. What do you have to do to get these kids to work hard?”

John weighs 200 pounds. Dennis weighs 400. Both wore their hair close to the scalp and Dennis had a beard.

They said they come to the cage all the time. “We spend 5, 6 bucks,” said Dennis, who would whack away himself when John’s hands got sore. “Anytime a dad and son can go out and do something, it’s money well spent.”

“Little leagues and pony leagues are your real bread and butter, but it’s critical to have something else,” Tyler said inside the building that looks out on the cages. It has a front-desk area, a video game room and will soon have a pro shop and deli.

Tyler, who also operates a cage in Torrance, hopes to draw a lunch-hour crowd from nearby McDonnell Douglas. “I’ve heard they have a lot of softball teams; we’re checking it out now,” he said.

Jerry Happ, wearing a shirt and tie, and a beeper attached to his slacks, entered the complex on his lunch hour and went straight for the change machine. He then put on a red helmet and swung away in the 70-m.p.h. cage.

“I hope to get back in a league,” said Happ, 35, who works for a computer service.

Down the way, Darryl Rose, 21, a mechanic at McDonnell Douglas, was overmatched against the brown blurs of the 80-m.p.h. machine. The ball, by the time he swung, had already thumped against the canvas backstop. He left in search of something slower.

Late in the afternoon, the softball cages became busy with young men and women, hoping that the practice would improve their timing and confidence enough to make them heroes on the dusty diamonds of their leagues.

Jim Cox, 26, shirtless and wearing spotless white uniform pants, had stopped en route to a slow-pitch game in Santa Fe Springs.

“I’m gonna get some hits tonight,” he told his young son after 15 minutes of impressive bashing.

Satisfied, he left. The star hitter for Rudy’s Runaways was ready.