Heater Sports Scorpion Soft Toss - Portable Automatic Toss Machine, Ideal for Kids, Teens, and Adults | Durable, Lightweight, and Accurate Batting Machine Designed to Perfect Batting Skills

My son is 7 and has become very baseball motivated, he was always wanting us to pitch to him but not always having the time to pitch made it difficult. A friend of ours, who is a coach for little league recommended we find something like this for our son to improve his hitting. With a little education, my son is able to go out, turn on the machine and understands how to load the machine and can play without adult assistance all the time. We have noticed his batting has improved and we are very pleased with this purchase. We feel we got a great value for our money.

My kid is in minor league rec baseball using regulation size balls. They stick and the delivery is cumbersome. I will purchase smaller balls update my review.

The top piece that mounts on the motor doesn't go on right. Haven't had time to call about it but it wobbles when I put it together. Ball just drops and the whole top moves. Will be contacting them for a return. I'm updating this review. I had a fix for it whereby I just put some packing tape (reversed it) around the part that the motor slips onto and it now holds it fine. Should've come pre-assembled though. It works fine now so I changed the rating to 4 stars.

Great addition to our practice equipment. Huge bonus that I don't have to sit on a bucket and toss balls anymore either.

Our kids baseball team love this machine!!

The machine is easy to assemble, it holds a dozen balls, and it’s quiet. That’s about it for the positives though. What I didn’t like was that it requires either an outlet to plug into or an external battery that costs extra, there’s no adjustability whatsoever, and it drops the ball straight down which isn’t terribly useful. In addition to those complaints the ball advance mechanism uses a foam roller to advance the balls which may wear out or become stiff over time and all the parts are just friction fit (other than the tripod legs/poles) so repeated disassembly and reassembly might be problematic.

Excellent product and my son loves it a lot

What I mean by my title is perhaps I misunderstood what a "soft toss" pitching machine does because what I found is that a ball rolls down the arm and then drops to the ground. I expected it to at least toss it in the air abit so that it had farther to travel before hitting the ground. In fact the ball literally just falls off the end of the bar and immediately heads toward the ground. My 6 yr old had to stand so close to the machine that it seemed that he was going to hit the stand every time he took a swing. I would call this a design flaw (particularly given the product photo which clearly shows the ball moving in an arc up and away from the machine). Secondly, I had trouble getting the c batteries to work and when they ultimately did the mechanism that moves the balls towards the arm actually ran in reverse and thus attempted to push the balls back up the ramp never allowing any balls to actually be "pitched". I understand that this is a DC motor and if the polarity of the batteries are reversed the machine will run in reverse but I was unable to get the machine to run at all with the batteries put in with the opposite polarity. I have returned the product because I found it to be useless frankly.

My husband bought this for when he practices with his team of 11 year-olds and he says that it works well