Batting cage debut proves to be an overall hit

For what it's worth, I'm a long-suffering baseball fan.

Like my underperforming soccer team and my national rugby team, my baseball team, the New York Yankees, more often than not, seems to enjoy making me suffer, but I continue to watch with unwavering loyalty and false hope, as teams I despise do better and win stuff.

The Yankees, for those unfamiliar with the sport, are to baseball what Manchester United is to Premier League soccer. They are arguably the game's most marketable club, as well as its most successful. They once enjoyed decades of unprecedented and unmatched success before, well, they didn't anymore.

They are roundly disliked by almost everyone who isn't a dyed-in-the-wool fan, and people love to see them lose. Recently, the team has been only happy to oblige.

The Bronx Bombers' summer performance has made a mockery of that moniker, and I sit there every morning, choking down my eggs and coffee as I watch the Yanks' offense fail to fire and its defense plumb new depths of ineptitude.

As I see each batter who steps to the plate swing and miss, or worse, get struck-out looking, and trudge back to the dugout, I shout at the screen: "Good grief! How hard can be to hit the damned ball?"

Pretty bloody hard, as it turns out.

As the Beijing blast furnace that passes for summer ever-so-slightly abated last weekend, and the air was so clear you could see all the way to the western hills, I decided to put my money where my mouth is and finally have a crack at swinging a bat in anger.

Fortunately, one of the city's biggest, prettiest and most well-heeled parks is also home to Jinfei Baseball and Softball Club, where, for the sum of around $10, a very nice and knowledgeable man will feed 100 yellow balls into a machine and point it at you from the far end of a long, narrow, sun-dappled cage.

Now, I am relatively new to the sport, only really discovering its charm while living in the United States about 10 years ago. I was fortunate enough to be swept up in the romance of the Chicago Cubs' 108-year-drought-ending World Series win, while personally witnessing the arrival of future Hall of Famer, and the world's current best player by almost every metric, Aaron Judge, to "The Show".

As such, I was very much a curious spectator, learning the rules as I went along, falling in love with the sport from the nosebleed seats high above Yankee Stadium's home plate, or hanging out with the big league scouts on random weekday afternoons at triple-A Round Rock Express near Austin, Texas. I wasn't brought up with the game, so I never learned to pitch, catch or, more importantly, hit.

This would be a first time, and it would come in the baseball backwater of Beijing. And it was a reckoning.

Before he let fly, my patient instructor schooled me in stance and grip with a light plastic bat, before giving me a much bigger, considerably heavier metal one and dispatching me to the plate.

He continued to bark instructions through a hole in the net as the first few balls flew past me and I flailed around trying to swat them, looking for all the world like a ballerina having a seizure. I was already working up a sweat, and discovering new muscles down my right flank.

After the first 20-or-so balls, I started to find my swing, slashing away as the pitches came thick and fast — I managed to foul most away, popping them up so vertically that I almost wore them as a hat as they came back down, or occasionally raked a few off the ground. Not one could I call a hit.

By ball 60, I was finally putting the meat of the bat on a few nasty line drives, even a few potential homers (at least a healthy extra base hit or two), but my thumbs, palms, wrists and triceps were on fire.

The amount of grip strength and muscle control required to get a decent swing, let alone even hit the damned ball, was the real lesson.

By the time I'd ripped through my 150 balls and stood back, exhausted, to watch my better half have a go, I was certainly seeing things from a far more enlightened perspective.

I was in the beginner cage, facing big, softball-sized missiles, being lobbed at no more than 70 km/h. What the pro ballers would call "meatballs". And I was still struggling to hit them.

Judge and Giancarlo Stanton, et al, are facing smaller, harder balls, being slung in various nefarious ways at upwards of 150 km/h. And they hit more than 20 out of every 150 pitches they face, doing so with less time to react than the blink of an eye.

They also endure the scrutiny of tens of thousands of people every time they swing. I only had the missus, the instructor and a small old man with a dog watching me.

With my arm's newly activated muscles twitching like an electrocuted frog, and somewhat humbled, I ended up leaving Chaoyang Park with a newfound respect for the art of hitting. As such, I offer the whole experience a solid thumbs-up.

Mainly as that is the only hand gesture my seized-up appendages can currently muster.