A: I'm not exactly sure what you are intimating in the first part of this question. If you are saying it would be preferable to have a machine with an automatic ball feeder, the First Pitch Relief Pitcher is not it. It is the only baseball or softball pitching machine First Pitch makes that cannot be used with the
First Pitch Automatic Ball Feeder.
If you are saying that her mother will always be there to feed balls into the pitching machine, that's another story. The only problem is, this particular pitching machine has a maximum softball pitching speed of 42 MPH, which is what 10 year olds throw and considerably under what high school girl softball pitchers throw (they tend to pitch in the mid 50s to low 60s).
With that in mind, the best machine for you is probably the
First Pitch Baseline Pitching Machine, which can throw baseballs or softballs and has a top speed of 60 MPH with softballs. The Baseline pitching machine can also be used with an the automatic ball feeder, which may or may not be important in your case. The Baseline costs nearly twice as much as the Relief Pitcher, so that is always a factor to consider, as well. You could always move the Relief Pitcher much closer to the plate, which will make it seem like it is throwing faster.
Then, there is the fly ball situation. Obviously, a machine like the Baseline will throw higher, longer fly balls than the Relief Pitcher because it has a 42% higher top speed. I should also point out that a feeder won't help at all with fly balls because the Baseline is back-fed and there is no way to get balls rolling down a feeder to then go uphill into a pitching machine that is pointing upward, so the feeder compatibility advantage the Baseline has over the Relief Pitcher is useless for fly balls (a feeder works perfectly well for grounders, however).
Finally, your question about balls ... Every pitching machine manufacturer recommends using dimple balls instead of real balls for various reasons but the most significant one is that real balls have covers that are glued to them. Squeezing a ball between pitching machine wheels and a stop plate eventually breaks that glue, the balls get mushy and the covers soon rip off of the balls. This is especially true of softballs which have even thinner covers than baseballs do. Dimple balls are the same size, same weight and same hardness as a regular softball, so there should be no practical difference between a dimple ball and a real softball, other than dimple balls are pretty much indestructible. A word of caution; however, never leave dimple balls out in the rain. If you do, they will become heavier and harder than a real softball, which could damage your daughter's bat. This is where the false belief that dimpled balls damage bats comes from. Public batting cages leave their balls out in the rain.
I hope this answered your questions!
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Answer provided by: Administrator (9/20/2018)
