Area baseball: New simulator makes players feel right at home

St. Cloud Times - Online Edition - March 21, 2005

SPICER - About the last place you'd expect to find a 100-mph fastball would be in this West Central Minnesota town on Green Lake, especially this time of year.
But there, in a converted elementary school gymnasium, Ryan Holthaus is trying his best to get around on a fastball most will never see.

"It's the best machine I've ever hit off of," said Holthaus, a St. Cloud Apollo graduate who had a cup of coffee with the Northern League's Sioux Falls Canaries last summer. "Actually, it's really the best. Amazing."

Holthaus, 22, a salesman who plays for the Cold Spring Springers amateur baseball team, is talking about ProBatter. It's a baseball pitching simulator whose realism is uncanny.

It's the centerpiece of an entrepreneurial endeavor by Dwight Kotila and Zach Nelson, who operate the Spicer Athletic Center in what was once Prairie Meadows Elementary School since December.

"There are so many different things you can work on with it that it's just amazing," said Kotila, co-owner of ProBatter. Kotila's also the head baseball coach at Ridgewater Community College in Willmar and a former Springer. Nelson is his assistant at Ridgewater.

ProBatter is patented and made by a Connecticut company. Cost of the machine is listed at $74,999. What distinguishes it from indoor pitching machines is a video display in which a realistic-looking pitcher throws balls to batters. It's enclosed in nets.

The hitch is that the pitcher can be a left-hander or right-hander and throw with the velocity and accuracy of a professional, college, high school or youth league pitcher. That's up to who is controlling the computer, which on this day was Kotila.

"We get groups in here for our clinics and the kids just love it," Kotila said. "They don't want to leave."

Kotila can program the machine to throw a variety of pitches, from fastballs, curveballs, split-finger fastballs, change-ups, sliders, cutters and screwballs. He can pick a location and change the velocity.

Holthaus, who played at Ridgewater and at Dakota State College in Madison, S.D., needed about a half-dozen pitches to get around on the 100-mph offerings, which are rare even in the major leagues. Once he had his timing down, Kotila then had the machine throw Holthaus a splitter, which came into home about 20 mph slower.

"Ahhhhhhh," Holthaus yelled as he missed the pitch by a lot.


Good idea


Kotila first saw ProBatter at a clinic three years ago and saw its potential as a workout tool for his junior college team.


"Say you're facing a big, hard-throwing right-hander like a Josh Krogman (an Apollo graduate who pitches for the University of Minnesota)," Kotila said. "You could bring your team in here and have them face the heat.

"Or, if you're facing an amateur guy throwing curveballs, you can do that, too."

The company's Web site says there are about 40 of the machines operating throughout the country. Kotila's is the only one in Minnesota. The closest after Spicer is in Illinois, where the Chicago White Sox have purchased a pair.

"There are some major colleges that have them out east and down south," Kotila said.

Cost for an hour's rental is $40. It's $25 for a half hour. Group rates are offered for teams. Kotila says numerous high school through amateur level ballplayers make their way to the athletic center, including groups from Sartell, St. Cloud, Paynesville and Long Prairie, among others.

Lots to love

"It's quite a machine; I love it," said Pete Schleper, an amateur baseball player for the Avon Lakers. "That's as close as you can get to live pitching as I've ever seen."The thing is, you can program it to work on certain things. One guy can sit in there all day."

Actually, that's not recomas much work as they're likely to want in a typical batting cage in about an hour or so, with everyone taking turns. An hour is about 150-200 cuts, Kotila said.

"You don't really want to go any longer than that," Holthaus said. "You start getting too tired."

The complex is open seven days a week, from 4-10 p.m. Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturdays and noon to 9 p.m. on Sundays. About 200 players per week make their way through the facility.

"The only remotely negative thing I can see with it is that the arm angle and release point is always in the same spot," Schleper said. "In amateur ball, you see some sidearmers and guys coming from three-quarters. At the higher levels though, like the pros, you don't see as much of that.

"If that's a drawback, that's the only one I can think of. It's really something. You think, 'Why should I drive all the way to Spicer to get some cuts?' But it's really worth it"