Pitching Machine A Gold Mine For Big Brother

While he preferred the high school science lab to the baseball diamond, Jason Jones could never turn down his little brother’s requests to throw batting practice.

That was before Jones’ aching arm gave way to a lawn blower and some plastic tubes: a pitching machine he invented as a ninth-grader. The machine is now throwing hundreds of thousands of dollars his way.

“I cannot believe I have something that’s in almost every single Wal-Mart in the nation,” said Jones, now 21. “That’s just totally unbelievable.”

The Stee-Rike 3 pitching machine, sold in Wal-Marts since 1995, is now in about 2,000 stores and still going strong, Wal-Mart spokeswoman Stacey Webb said. At least one minor league baseball team swears by them.

Jones’ father, David, says about 35,000 have sold in the past three years, turning a $500,000 profit. He’s talking with Kmart and Target stores and looking for a publicity spot on a network TV morning show.

The money has put Jones through college - with plenty to spare.

The University of South Carolina senior, who’s studying to be a research doctor and planning to go to medical school, says classmates always tease him, telling him he should give up school and live off the royalties.

“They always say, ‘You’re the one with the invention,”’ he said. “It seems like it’s not really happening. But it definitely is.”

It all started from the mind of someone more comfortable with a slide rule than a slider.

As Jones grew up in suburban Irmo he took apart motors to see how they worked and used his Erector Set to build silly devices. Sitting on his living room floor, he would devise contraptions like the game Mousetrap, where a mechanical sequence would cause a ball to roll.

His little brother, Brantley, would always ask him to pitch batting practice in their back yard, and Jones eventually got fed up - and tired.

The Stee-Rike 3 began with surplus tubes and an old vacuum cleaner in the basement. But the balls just dribbled out, so Jones tried the family leaf blower.

“I thought it would be faster than the vacuum, but I didn’t realize that would be what we needed,” he said.

From one end of the machine sticks 36 inches of 3-inch plastic pipe. Coming out the top is another pipe into which you drop balls. They come together in a box that controls the airflow.

Attach a leaf blower - not included in the $29.95 price - on the back end, turn it on, drop in a ball and the ball whips out the other end at 50 mph. The entire assembly sits on the ground with a short stand in front aiming the ball upward.

David Jones, who has dabbled in marketing and manufacturing, now works on Stee-Rike 3 full time. He once imported motorized bicycles and has worked with Ford setting up factories in India.

He said that when he saw his son’s pitching machine, he thought it was something else that could make it big.

He called Bill Shannahan, then general manager for the Class-A Capital City Bombers, and asked him to try it. The Bombers eventually took the Stee-Rike 3 on road trips to warm up.

In 1994, Bombers slugger Tim Howard won the South Atlantic League batting crown and said the machine was a big reason why.

The first bulky prototype was assembled at home from custom-made plastic forms. The machine has gone through several slimmed-down versions and now the Joneses are assembling a downtown Columbia plant to turn out from 1,200 to 1,700 machines a day.

“I guess the hard thing was making it look so simple,” Jason Jones said. “That took some time.”

He still marvels at his creation and loves watching his baseball business grow, even though he’s never been to a ball game, majors or minors.

As for Brantley, he improved enough to play first base at Irmo High School and hit .547 one year.