It’s the height of the baseball season, but things are at a low ebb at Frozen Ropes, Chicago’s newest state-of-the-art baseball training facility. At noon on a sunny summer day, not one trademark clink of aluminum bat on ball can be heard in the 32,000-square-foot, indoor baseball arena.
The irony that baseball season is the slow season is not lost on Brian O’Connor, 29, a former Houston Astros prospect from Arlington Heights who is general manager and director of instruction at Frozen Ropes. He points out that the morning campers have just left, but acknowledges that this is the time of year when kids play baseball where it was meant to be played: outdoors.
Come the fall, he expects business to rally, thanks to the new, harsh reality that seems to have taken hold of youth baseball: Any kid who wants to entertain the dream of playing in the big leagues had better be working on his game year-round.
Indoor baseball centers seem to have popped up like tear-downs the last few years, and Frozen Ropes is the Trump Tower of the bunch. While most are converted spaces in remote locations where function trumps design, Frozen Ropes–the term is baseball jargon for a line drive–is a veritable palace of stately brick and darkened glass at 6000 W. Touhy Ave. (773-631-4300).
Inside, there is an if-you-build-it, they-will-come aura. A high roof above a spacious, artificial-turf baseball diamond of major-league dimensions allows for real fly balls. Adjacent to the diamond and on an upper level are two full-length pitching tunnels with radar guns, one multi-use tunnel, a video room, two party areas and five batting cages.
If the notion of a batting cage conjures up images of swinging near a rusty gate at balls hurled from a mechanical monster that resembles a snow-blower, you owe yourself a peek at Frozen Ropes. Here the balls are delivered through an opening in a giant screen that corresponds with the hand of a virtual pitcher.
Four machines are adjustable for speed, including one dedicated to fast-pitch softball. The fifth has options not only for speed, but also for different pitches–slider, curve, slurve, fastball, cut-fastball, split-finger, change-up. It’s a repertoire that no major-league pitcher, much less a dad, could hope to duplicate.
Another thing distinguishes Frozen Ropes from other Chicago-area facilities, which typically are mom-and-pop shops: It is a franchise operation, one of 26 training centers in 15 states.
Founded in New York in 1990 by former college baseball coach Tony Abbatine, Frozen Ropes has a codified curriculum in which all of its instructors are trained. At its most advanced level, Frozen Ropes consults on visual development with major-league teams. At its most basic, it provides hand-eye coordination games to 3- and 4-year-olds in “born to play” classes.
Since opening last September, the Chicago facility has attracted hundreds of young ballplayers (the clientele is almost exclusively high school age or younger) who have come for lessons or with teams that have rented the infield at $200 an hour. O’Connor says about a third of the customers are girls, and four out of five kids are focused on the glamor side of the game: knocking the stuffing out of a ball with a bat.
Becoming proficient at that involves learning the 12 “leverage points” of a batting swing. Listening to O’Connor review them–from the “dynamic set-up” with knob of the bat pointing at the catcher’s shin guards to the “load” to the “closed stride angle” to the “pelvic snap” to the “power L” and “shoulder V” to the “straw paw”–it seems a miracle that any kid could actually hit a baseball just by swinging a bat at it.
“You’d be surprised at how many 7-year-olds understand this,” he says. “The idea is that you teach young kids in a controlled environment, and if they do it enough, they don’t have to think about it.”
An individual membership to Frozen Ropes costs $395 per year. That gets your future hall-of-famer five private lessons and a computerized video analysis of his hitting swing or pitching delivery in which his form can be compared frame-by-frame with that of selected major-league players. (O’Connor says few youngsters are choosing the Sammy Sosa option.)
Jim Loftus, a volunteer coach of 11- and 12-year-olds in the nearby Edgebrook-Sauganash baseball league, bought a membership for his son, Jimmy, 11, in January.
“It was a bit of an extravagance, but I was still in the glow of Christmas,” he says. “I wanted him to get some coaching from someone other than me, in the hope he’d think I wasn’t insane. I was impressed with the facility and the instructors. It seemed like money well spent.”
With baseball season coming, Loftus combined a member’s discount and a promotional offer to reserve 10 one-hour sessions in a batting cage for his team for $600. “After the discounts, the price was competitive with other facilities,” he said. “It served its purpose: We got the kids hitting.”
Speaking by phone from Verona, Italy, where Frozen Ropes has launched its first European operation, founder Abbatine says, “Baseball instruction is now a multimillion-dollar business. It’s not the 1960s anymore. The days of getting a pickup game going are over. . . . It’s no different than if your son or daughter has an interest in piano or is struggling in math.”
Well, yes, except that few piano teachers and math tutors charge $85 an hour, the rate for a lesson at Frozen Ropes.
“We accommodate the lunatic parents who are planning for their kids to be in the major leagues,” Abbatine says. “But most of our business is not in that category; we’re about making the below-average player respectable. The reason business is booming at Frozen Ropes is the amount of misinformation out there about how to play baseball.”
It’s not clear that business is booming in Chicago. Although O’Connor cites statistics that training has increased the bat speed and pitching velocity of some kids by 8 miles per hour, he is less certain about membership figures, saying, “We’ve exceeded our goals in the first year, and our numbers are growing every day.”
One person who is dubious about Frozen Ropes is Scott Swarm, a coach of the Edgebrook Bulldogs, a travel team of 11-year-olds that rented the center throughout the winter. “It’s a great facility, but we won’t be going back there,” he says. “There are other places available that serve our purpose and are much cheaper.”
From observing private lessons given by instructors during his team’s practices, Swarm says, “I’m not impressed with the Frozen Ropes core philosophy. It’s just an aggregation of general knowledge presented in their jargon. Kids need proper mechanics, but you don’t want them all stressed out about the 12 points of the correct swing. I really wonder if this high-end advance training at an early age isn’t taking the fun out of just hitting the ball.”
Abbatine fields that type of criticism like a routine grounder. “Hitting is how kids have fun,” he says. “When a kid is 0 for April, he’s not having fun.”
Which points up another reality of today’s youth baseball: If Mom or Dad can’t teach their kids to hit, they’d better know the leverage points of taking out their credit cards.
– – –
Summer, fall, winter and spring training
Frozen Ropes may be the newest and biggest kid on the block, but it is not the only baseball instruction game in town. Below is a sampling of training offerings in the Chicago area. Some are indoor facilities open year round, others are instructional programs conducted at different locations. Rates vary widely, according to types of lessons, class sizes and services offered.
–P.E.
Chicago: Do It Right Baseball, doitrightbaseball.com, 773-307-1822.
Cary: MVP Sports Academy LLC, mvpcary.com, 847-516-1400.
Evanston: Line Drive Baseball Club, linedrivebaseballclub.com, 847-570-0802.
Glenview: The Strike Zone, thestrikezone.org, 847-904-7407.
Lake Forest: MVP Baseball and Softball Training Center, mvptrainingcenter.com, 847-549-1687.
Lisle: White Sox Training Academy, bullsoxacademy.com, 630-752-9225.
Wheeling: National Baseball & Softball Academy, nationalbsa.com, 847-229-1009.
Wilmette: Illinois Baseball Academy, illinoisbaseballacademy.com, 847-899-3620.
———-
q@tribune.com
