AS THE SUMMER INCHED toward its merciful end and the Las Vegas heat began to relent, I noticed that all of the batting cages in the city had disappeared. Not the privatized, state-of-the-art indoor facilities that could be rented by the hour so youth teams and elite high school prospects had a place to hone their skills—those pay-for-play sites were alive and well. I was concerned with a true endangered species, the cages of a more municipal flavor. The cages that often found themselves attached to driving ranges, mini-golf courses, and go-kart tracks. The cages that only took gold coins and dispensed rubber yellow balls that seemingly fired at will, with little concern for accuracy or the safety of the batter. The cages that offered generic bats on the walls, with only a chain-link fence and a flimsy door to protect you from other patrons and goading friends. There was a specific feeling that I craved, more than a year after my baseball career ended—unceremoniously, in a hidden corner of Cedar Rapids, Iowa—and I was hoping to return to a time when helmets were ill-fitting, swings imperfect and ugly. I was rather new to Vegas, so maybe I didn’t know where to look. But a lack of results from endless Google searches began to make me question whether these iron giants that I knew had ever existed at all.
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