Kids were lined up at each batting cage door, tokens jangling in their hands as they impatiently waited their turns to take some swings.

“Did you hit the fast one?” Nick Morton, 9, asked his friends behind him in line.

		“Yeah! I hit a shot!” responded Felix Chmiel, 10, who was dressed in his Downtown Little League uniform and was practicing his swing, without a bat, a few steps away. “I hit a shot on every one!” another boy chimed in. There may have been some slight exaggeration – call it youthful overexuberance – going on, given the many swings and misses, accompanied by grunts, seen inside the cages. But there was no overstating the excitement among the Downtown children who were on hand as six new batting cages opened in Hudson River Park just south of Pier 25 on June 5. Adding to the fun, free tokens were being handed out to help the kids break in the new machines. And it seemed like the first afternoon in a week without rain. So the
young sluggers, when they walked out of the cages after their 15 pitches, got right back in line for some more hacks. The batting cages, along with a basketball court 20 feet away, are the latest additions to the Tribeca portion of the Hudson River Park. A skate park, very popular with the 15-and-under set, opened a little farther noth on the esplanade several months ago and the trapeze school is back after its successful debut last summer. Officials from the Hudson River Park Trust, which is building and operating the park, and from the Downtown Little League were on hand to inaugurate the facilities, and there was even the requisite ribbon-cutting with oversized scissors before the kids got to don blue helmets and enter the cages. But the adults were smart enough to keep the formalities brief. The pieces of ribbon had not even hit the ground after the ritual snipping, and the kids who had been recruited for the photo-op whirled and jumped back on line. The would-be Derek Jeters had their choice of six different pitch speeds -- slow, medium and fast for younger children, and slow, medium and fast for older kids and adults – as well as options for baseball and softball. “At Chelsea Piers there are just three batting cages, and if you can’t hit the medium, you have to go to the slow, which is too easy,” said Chmiel, a third grader at nearby P.S. 234. “Here, you have the fast for kids, and then the really fast for grown ups. At first I didn’t know how fast it would be and I missed a lot of balls. But then I started hitting them.” Lucas Ortega, 8, a Battery Park City resident and third grader at P.S. 89, just a block south, hit several line drives before emerging from a cage and handing his helmet to another eager batter. “It’s really fun. But it was a little hard,” he said, wiping away some sweat. “The pitches were just like in Little League, so it will help me a lot. It’s good, I can just walk over here after school.” The idea for the batting cages came from Downtown Little League officials, who over the winter asked the Trust if they could install a couple of pitching machine for players to practice. The Trust embraced the idea and moved quickly to construct the six cages, which are open to the general public from 2 p.m. till dusk on weekdays and 10 a.m. to dusk on weekends, weather permitting, and starting June 16 they will open at. 10 a.m every day. (But to prevent kids from playing hooky, no one under 18 will be allowed to use the cages during school hours.) The league and the Trust are working on setting aside some batting time just for league players. “What we’ve always lacked in our practices is batting practice,” said Vito Suppa, the league’s president, as he watched kids taking swings. (Later he got to try out the cages himself, along with Ken Tannenbaum, the league’s vice president.) “This gives us an opportunity to let coaches concentrate on the batting aspect of the game, to work with the kids, not in a game situation. It’s very hard to find a coach who can pitch 200 batting practice pitches and throw strikes and have it be worthwhile.” “It will be great for the kids, but also for people in the community, people like you and me, to take some swings” said Vincent Licata, another league official, who was with his 10-year-old son, also named Vincent. The free tokens were a one-time bonus. The batting cages will cost $2 for 15 pitches, which is cheaper than the Chelsea Piers cages. Nick Morton, who lives in Tribeca and is a third grader at Packer School in Brooklyn, said he was surprised when he found out that the batting cages were coming. “I was like, ‘Wow, I never thought we’d have batting cages right here.’ I thought there would be just the skate park.” Asked how much he thought he’d use the cages, he said, “A lot! Ten times a week. I hope.”