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A lot of youth baseball leagues across the U.S. today have become pretty sophisticated, with high-end facilities that offer players within the league the use of pitching machines, batting cages, sliding pits and all kinds of other training aides. This is a good thing, if a community can afford it, and if the league officers who run the program allow all players of all age levels to use the facilities, rather than have them used exclusively to hone the skills of their all-star tournament team players, while the kids who need the extra practice the most are shut out. In my opinion, baseball is a simple game that requires working on improving fundamental skills through repetition, and this can be accomplished in simple ways without a lot of expensive equipment. Throwing and catching skills can be improved with a lot of games of catch with dad (or mom if she is so inclined), or, if another person isn’t available, with your glove, a rubber ball and a concrete porch or wall. Most kids of my generation  would ride around the neighborhood with their baseball glove on the handlebars of their bicycle, looking for a friendly pick-up game, and on days when there just weren’t enough other players around, spend hours bouncing that rubber ball off the porch or local school wall, giving their throwing arm a great workout and improving their fielding skills by scooping up that ball every time it bounced off the concrete. Of course you knew how to bounce that ball off the wall just right to produce popups, line drives or hard grounders, depending on what you needed the most practice on. Improving hitting skills is another story. These days there are batting cages available somewhere in almost every community, and it’s not uncommon for parents to take their kids there and spend an afternoon hitting some balls, without costing a fortune. It can be an enjoyable day for the family, especially if the kids can coax mom and/or dad into the cage and get a good  laugh at their old rusty gate swing. One of the best youth hitting aides around these days, however, is the “batting stick”, which requires 2 people, in most cases a parent or coach, and is a terrific tool to improve hitting skills by honing a player’s hand – eye coordination.  It forces the young hitter to “keep his eye on the ball” which is the ultimate hitting fundamental. A picture of this training tool can be seen below. The batting stick is recommended for ages 14 and up, but I’ve seen it used safely by players as young as 7 or 8 when supervised by a coach or parent. One thing parents should realize is that very few kids have the skills to become major league baseball players and forcing a kid to over-practice or train because you want them to be great, when the child has little or no interest, is just a bad idea. If you have one of those kids, however, that you have to extract off the diamond with a pry bar every day after he/she has spent the entire day there, who lives and breathes baseball and can’t get enough of it, and would like to provide with training tools to help enhance their practice experience, a great website to check out for ideas is http://SKLZ.com which is where the Target Two-Man Batting Stick pictured below can be found, along with some other terrific training aides.