Sometimes a batting cage is oh so much more than a place to improve a batting average.
Take the cage at Sevier Middle School, its new netting draping over it like an oak leaf canopy.
The cage was installed two seasons ago – two teams of 15 kids each – have taken practice there.
But before them, there were a hundred or more. Some are playing minor league baseball. Many played in college. All learned life lessons from the sport.
The cage was ordered online and delivered to the Hoffman home at the base of Paris Mountain 10 years ago. It cost $800.
Jeff Hoffman remembers three boxes, one of them huge (that would be for the net). This is no pretend batting case. It’s 50 feet long and 10 feet high all around.
Hoffman bought the cage for his son, Asher, who was playing on the Wade Hampton High School team.
Hoffman had been coaching Asher’s teams since T-ball, but this cage, that was something different, something more.
“We probably spent a thousand hours out there,” Hoffman said. “A true father-son bonding experience.”
On winter nights, Asher would come home after baseball practice. It was dark. So Hoffman installed lights. He bought a pitching machine.
“In the baseball world, the more practice you get, the more balls you see,” Hoffman said.
Make no mistake. This was not a father living vicariously through his son. Hoffman, who is 64, was a runner in high school and college.
It was most often Asher who was picking up the bucket of balls and asking his dad to hit a few.
Soon, teammates were showing up for some practice. He never worried about the liability if someone got hurt. In fact, he was the one who was beaned a few times with balls hit back at him while he was pitching.
Coaches from other teams would call to ask for cage time.
Hoffman accommodated.
That’s how Brad Chalk, who played at Riverside and Clemson, got there. The Padres drafted him in 2007, and this season he’s with the AA Altoona, Pa., Curve, an affiliate of the Pirates.
Hoffman estimates Major League Baseball drafted six players who used the cage. Dozens, like Asher, received college scholarships.
Asher went to Hiwasee Junior College in Tennessee then transferred to College of Charleston, where an elbow injury ended his baseball career.
So Hoffman packed up the cage. He and his wife, Lucy, wanted to do some landscaping after all those years.
Then Hoffman got a call from Foothills Little League. Would he coach a team? Eleven and 12 year olds?
“We put it in somebody else’s yard – the parent of one of the kids,” Hoffman said.
A season later, he was asked to become head coach at Sevier Middle School, home of the Falcons. The cage went with him.
Now it’s sunk permanently in the ground near the school’s new athletic fields. Hoffman, who owns a textile company in Mauldin, has used his $1,200 yearly stipend for a new pitching machine and the new net.
“I wasn’t looking to be paid,” he said. “I just have a passion for the sport.”
Baseball teaches life lessons, Hoffman said. The most important: baseball is a game of failure. You’re doing exceptionally well if you hit the ball three times for every 10 at bats.
“You learn it doesn’t matter if you strike out. Forget about that. Your next at bat is coming,” he said. “You can’t give up because you made a mistake.”
Not too long ago, Hoffman went to Sevier to work on the field. He saw a father and son – 10 years old or so – going into the cage, carrying a bucket of balls.
“I thought, boy this thing has come full circle.”
Tags: baseball, batting, Lyn Riddle
