I Will Dare: Going on a date to the Kansas City Sports Club’s batting cages makes me a swinger

In baseball, 50 miles per hour is much faster than it looks from the stands.

As an avid Kansas City Royals fan, I’m used to watching batters effortlessly smack pitches traveling at twice that speed. But when I stood inside a batting cage at Kansas City Sports Club in Leawood, I recoiled when the pitching machine spat that first ball. The deadly projectile slapped the heavy tarp hanging behind me.

“You need to step in sooner,” my boyfriend yelled. “Keep your eye on the ball.”

I adjusted my ill-fitting batting helmet and nodded. It seemed so simple when he put it that way — at their most elemental, don’t all sports sound simple? But when I took a whack at the next pitch, I caught only air. (I’d like to imagine that Royals announcer Denny Matthews would have commented on my powerful swing.)

Open since 2012, Kansas City Sports Club (3610 West 95th Street, behind the Price Chopper) features four indoor batting cages. The pitching machine in each cage has baseball and softball settings and can be adjusted to accommodate a variety of speeds and skill levels — slow-pitch softball, baseballs that whiz across the plate at 70 mph, velocities between. The building also houses an indoor turf for practicing infield drills, a weights-and-cardio area, and hitting tunnels.

When my boyfriend and I first entered the large, warehouse-like space, it seemed everyone present was under the age of 12, or a parent of someone under the age of 12 — but that, we’d soon understand, was only because the kids were more vocal. In reality, adults well past grad-school age had decided to spend this wet, chilly afternoon honing their skills in distant sync with MLB spring training. Still, the four cages skewed young; batting were a girls’ softball team, a young men’s baseball team, a couple of little leaguers with their parents — and my boyfriend and I, who play together on a softball team on pace to win a game this summer. Maybe.

Before entering our cage, I selected some head protection from the house stock, as well as a long, lightweight bat. (If you have your own bat, you should probably bring it. If you have your own helmet, can I borrow it next time?) With four pitching machines going at once, it can seem loud and chaotic at first if you’re new to the routine, with balls constantly bouncing across the turf and off the overhead netting. None ever came close to hitting me, but the fear of head trauma might be the biggest reason why I’m not a professional athlete. Besides reasons of innate skill, practiced hand-eye coordination and pickiness about uniforms.

This was my first batting practice of the year, so I attempted slow-pitch softball – most likely the kind of stuff I’ll soon see during actual games. Surprisingly, I managed to hit pretty well. One ball even soared upward before the netting impeded its trajectory. Woulda been a hit, I thought. I might actually help my team this season, at least offensively. On this day, however, there was no practicing the art of catching a fly ball without falling flat on my back.

Then my boyfriend entered the cage and announced his intention to hit some “heaters” — my notice that he was cranking the machine to 70 mph. Earlier I’d watched a player from the men’s baseball team two cages over attempt to hit a few of these pitches. After he’d adjusted the machine to the appropriate height, he made some pretty solid contact. Naturally athletic, my boyfriend also managed to make contact with a couple of fastballs — while wearing Crocs, even. The other man taking turns at our cage, a 30-something softball player who wanted to get in a few practice swings before his first game next week, laughed. “Is that 70 miles an hour?” he asked.

Then the machine jammed, leaving my boyfriend standing at the plate with his bat on his shoulder, awaiting a next pitch that would never come. These automated balks happened now and again during our visit, but the staff always made quick repairs. Unlike other batting cages I’ve been to, all four machines appeared to be, for the most part, operational.

Not one to shy away from a challenge, I decided to up my speed as well. I stayed somewhere between Charlie Brown and Mighty Casey at the virtual plate, until, just before we left, my bat found one of those 50 MPH pitches, knocking it vengefully back at the machine.

“That was a hit,” my boyfriend said. And right then, despite the cold rain outside, my spring officially started.