Zooka ZS740 Pitching Machine Review

I bought a Zooka 3 years ago and it's seen heavy use each season including fall ball in my team practices for both little league and Pony baseball. We've used it primarily for batting practice, occasionally for flyballs, to reduce coach's arm fatigue. For kids under age 11, it's helped our kids develop better hitting mechanics, since we can perform slow-motion video studies to determine swing flaws with pitches at the same speed and location.

Also, the kids can work on specific problems at specific speeds and locations. For kids 11 years old and older, we can set it to its random variable speed mode so our players can work on fast ball/change-up pitching to develop better balance and match real life pitching situations. It's only drawback is not throwing curveballs but our 13 year old and older pitchers need practice throwing curveballs anyway, so we practice hitting curves with live pitching. It's been very reliable as we're using the original battery. We did need to repair the optics once, which failed, but I called the factory and they shipped out a new optics cable at no charge and we had it running again in less than a week. The Zooka value can't be beat for players 13 and under. Once the kids get to 14 years or older, the Zooka won't handle speeds above about 65 mph.