One of the worst things about the winter time is how its frigid temperature cuts into baseball training. If you’re a pitcher like me and make your home in a cold weather state, you know it’s tough to find places to throw when the snow starts falling. You compete with other indoor sports, camps, and holidays for heated venues just to try and keep your arm in some semblance of a routine- oh for the days you could just go outside and play a game of catch! However, a pitcher is the only player on the ball field that requires terrain modifications to perform. Sure, you may find that warm, large, space to get a game a catch in, and that might work for a position player, but will you be able to find a mound to throw off of? I’m talking, a good, sturdy, respectable slant and not one of those bicycle ramps with a piece of scrap lumber acting as a rubber?
Pitching Mounds: they seem to be the last thing thought off for high school teams or even baseball facilities. They get the shaft because, among other reasons, they’re expensive and baseball equipment is already expensive to start with. Netting, bats, screens, and balls, all are going to get destroyed and have to be replaced; now ya have to pay for a glorified handicapped access ramp with a rubber on it? Surely you can make that rudimentary geometric shape yourself, right?
And there is reason to try, believe you me. Industrial made mounds by reputable companies can easily cost over $1200 for one. Their poured compostite bodies sure look sexy and make you feel professional grade, but cost a pretty penny and seem to break effortlessly when left in the hands of high school freshmen (freshman ALWAYS get saddled with equipment setup and teardown, FYI). They also require shipping fees. So, since budgets for equipment are always tight and mounds look easy enough to produce, often someone professing great construction and power-tool prowess elects to make a mound for the cause, only to build a mutant of wood and carpet that takes a team of elephants to move.
I ran into this problem when I was young and training in the minors. I needed to throw in the off-season. I lived at home during this time, in a rural area, and trained at my old high school which had a small sports equipment budget. I trained at other high schools as well, but in a smaller, poorer area where it was always the same issue: lack of a mound to throw off of. To combat this, I elected to build my own mounds. I didn’t have a lot of money so I couldn’t build something expensive. I also wanted something I could move myself but wasn’t so light and cheap it fell apart. I knew I would make some trade-offs to create such a mound, but my goal was to make something fucntional, strong, easy, and inexpensive to reproduce.
Why reproduce? Well, I figured if I could sell the idea to all the area high schools, I’d always have a place to throw and a mound to throw off of. If I made it cheap, easy and durable, their boosters could cover the cost, I could build it quickly, and everyone would have a mound for their program and guest minor leaguers to throw from that would hold up.
I’m going to share those plans with you now. Bear in mind, these are not perfect plans, but they are good ones (good enough for me!) and the mound shown here will cost you about $120 dollars to make, including screws and castors. I used tennis court paint on the top of my mounds, as it’s cheap, tacky (so you don’t slip when you throw on it) and if it wears down, just put another coat on—carpet is nice but a pain to replace.
Also, the castors allow you to move the mound with one person. Furthermore, there are no parts in this design that cannot be found in your local Lowes or Home Depot. It’s all right-off-the-shelf parts. At most of the bigger chains, you can have the stores lumber staff make the cuts for you (the simple ones) on their panel saws- a very nice perk. Finally, the materials scale easily… you can make two mounds for $180 and three for $220 since you get discounts in bulk.
To get the blueprints, you’ll need to download a program called Sketch-up, a free 3D drafting tool (yes, I modeled it in 3D!) available from google here: Sketch-Up . Then, you just need to download the plans from me and open them in Sketch-up. Here are the plans…
Once open, click the scenes and steps tabs at the top of the Sketch-Up window. It will walk you through the entire process.
*Warning and disclaimer* You’ll need power tools to build this, so make sure you have an adult present who knows their way around tools. Also, if you drop this on your head or hurt yourself, or something else clumsy, I’m not responsible.