Ah, the life of a coach. Spending day after day hitting grounders. “Let’s get one!” And around the horn you go. “Turn Two!” And back around again. Over and over and over and over… “I do this for living. I hit fungoes,” says Steve Smith, the Rangers’ third base and infielders coach. “And, I can hit a fungo. But I’ve seen high school and college coaches where they’re popping one up or hitting one over there. It’s ugly.”
Just ask Romy Cucjen. A former high school coach with Shreveport’s Evangel Christian Academy, he knows firsthand the difficulties of hitting grounders to infielders. He recalled a conversation he had one day with the father of one of his players.
“He tried to hit ground balls to his son one night and couldn’t,” remembers Cucjen. “He said, ‘where’s the machine that can do it automatically?’ He said it half jokingly, but he was really serious because his back was hurting him and his son was frustrated.”
The more he thought about his conversation with the father, the more Cucjen realized there was a need for such a contraption. He himself spent so much time hitting grounders to his players that he rarely was able to actually coach them.
“I stood at home plate and got balls out of a bucket and hit to third, short, second and first,” he says. “I wasn’t even watching the players catch them. I was just hitting them. I was a machine. I started thinking about the value that would give me to be out there with the players.”
Thus, an idea was born – FungoMan, a machine that could be programmed to fire off grounders, fly balls, line drives, short hops, whatever a coach needs. Over three and a half years, Cucjen found engineers, got patents, and produced four generations of his innovation before finally contacting the Rangers about a test run.
“I played with [Don] Wakamatsu at Arizona State,” says Cucjen. “We kept up through the years, and I called him last summer and said, ‘we’ve got this machine I want you to see.’ We brought it over to the ballpark, and he said, ‘all right, you’ve got 10 minutes.’”
Forty-five minutes later, with the grounds crew basically kicking them off the field, Cucjen had won over Wakamatsu. He was invited to bring FungoMan to the Rangers instructional league camp last September where the equipment again received rave reviews.
“They used it in some cool ways,” says Cucjen. “Balls to the warning track, balls in the gaps, relay drills, baserunning drills. They did a lot of innovative stuff.”
The success there, in turn, earned Cucjen and his crew a trip to Rangers Spring Training in Arizona. FungoMan became a regular feature.
“The main thing is it allows me to, instead of just standing there hitting fungoes, be out there next to the player talking to them,” says Smith. “This actually allows me to teach more.”
FungoMan has two rubber tires that look much like a normal pitching machine with a base that holds 300 balls and can be pushed from one place to another. Through an attached computer, called a programmable logic controller, it can be set up to hit baseballs to an exact spot in an exact way in any sequence.
Want a slow roller down third, followed by a shot into the right center gap, followed by a backhand chopper to first followed by a line drive to the hole between third and short? FungoMan can do it. Want repeated short-hop throws down to second? No problem. How fast do you want it? Every three seconds? Every 10?
“This thing is exact,” says Smith. “You know, hitting a pop-up exactly where you want to isn’t easy. I’ll hit a pop-up, but I can’t tell you it’s going to drop right where I want. This gave us a true popup and allowed the drill to be done right.”
How do you practice fielding that short fly into shallow right center where the center fielder, right fielder and second baseman all have to communicate? Try hitting a ball there five times in a row. FungoMan took out the guesswork and allowed players and coaches to spend more time on their fundamentals.
“I don’t think it’s taking my job away,” laughs Smith, “or that we’re not going to need fungoes anymore because there is a place for them. But, if my job is to hit fungoes and that’s all I’m good for, then I’m not a very good coach. Coaching has to come first. It’s such a great help for me.”