Baseball has been in my family since the game was invented. My grandfather played and then managed. My dad was the neighborhood star pitcher. Me? I played in high school a long time ago. I once led my Summer league in triples. Never hit a home run though.
I blame the Devil’s invention – The Wiffle ball.
I grew up in the city. I loved urban life a lot, but we lived miles from the nearest ball field. We’d put in the effort to get to the park for a game or two a week, but it was almost impossible to make the trip more often than that.
Outside of a formal game, we kids rarely saw live pitching. We loved the game so much and wanted to excel, but how could we practice and get better if we could not experience pitches?
Then it happened — someone went out and bought a Wiffle ball set.
Hmmm. It was baseball-like. There was a ball and a bat. The ball was city safe – wouldn’t break a window or even scratch a car. The plastic bat would hurt if you walked into it while someone was swinging, but it was otherwise pretty safe; so we spent hours every day pitching and swinging. 
The pitches were amazingly cartoony, whizzing in like a rocket and yet moving as unpredictably as a butterfly. I can still imagine Bugs Bunny winding up and hurling an impossible physics defying pitch.
We had fun though.
We saw hundreds of those Looney Tunes pitches every day. The bat was so light we could start our swing when the pitch was just inches in front of the plate and still make contact.
We thought we were training ourselves to be great baseball players…we were so wrong.
With every Wiffle ball pitch we devolved as ballplayers. The Wiffle pitch trajectories were absurd, with no
connection to real life. Maybe we were improving ourselves for games like badminton or ping pong, but certainly not for baseball.
To become a good baseball player you need to train as a baseball player.
It is widely known that hitter development in baseball requires that the player see pitch-after-pitch-after-pitch thrown by a good hurler. It is how you learn to recognize the type and location of the pitch being thrown.
Whether you are a high school student or a seasoned pro you need to practice repeatedly against realistic pitching. You can’t just practice against a robotic pitching machine. You can’t learn to recognize pitch type or location hitting with a tee, or with soft toss batting practice. And you can’t expect a live pitcher to throw to you for very long periods of time per session.
So what should you do?
Well, if you are a serious ball player, don’t run out and buy a Wiffle ball. Honestly, it ruined me. If it weren’t for Wiffle ball hurting my timing, recognition, and swing, I’d be getting ready for Hall of Fame induction by this point in my life – if not MLB, at least for my neighborhood.
Check out PITCHvr™ Vision, where you can enter a virtual reality ballpark and face all types of pitchers throwing all types of pitches – for as long as you like. It is an affordable, one-time cost with no subscription involved. Do your future fans a favor, and make it to the Hall!