Between Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game, which takes place tonight at 8 p.m. ET, and Amazon’s “Prime Day” sales, which celebrate the service’s anniversary by offering deep discounts on a wide variety of products, you can find the Playfinity Gaming Baseball, a kind of “smart ball” that recently came to market. Playfinity provided ComicBook.com with a chance to try one out, and it’s a cool idea, well-executed, and (at least in these first two weeks or so) surprisingly durable considering that we kind of thought we’d be able to destroy it by now.
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The ball comes with an app you can download to track statistics like the speed of your throws, how many catches you made (and missed), and things like how long a throw stays in the air and how fast you turn it around after catching. It’s designed for kids, with the infographics and instructions all topping out at around 50 miles per hour on throw speed, but if you’re using it with your kids, it will likely measure your throws pretty accurately as well, and so far, as we said, we haven’t managed to destroy it just by being an adult.
The ball has a number of games to improve your accuracy and timing, and some low-level coaching pointers that will help kids playing 12-and-under ball keep the fundamentals in mind. If you’re somebody who hasn’t played in a while, or needs a refresher on some of the basics, it’s a fun way to engage with the sport in an interactive way that isn’t as intense or expensive as going to batting cages.
You can see a promo video for it below.
As you can imagine, between the bluetooth and being an outdoor item that you play with in the summer, the ball will need to take some breaks or get charged back up every so often. It isn’t typically disruptive as long as you’re not doing marathon practices in 100-degree heat, but it’s worth keeping in mind. Like any bluetooth anything, it can sometimes drop your connection, but generally, my experience has been that it’s very accurate most of the time, and reconnects pretty fast.
The games themselves are pretty simple, but as far as my experience, they’re tracking pretty accurately. Playing with an 8-year-old, she stays engaged and entertained longer than an adult would, and wants to bounce around between the handful of mini-games. The best part of the app, for those of us already exhausted by the lack of real ownership in the digital space, is that there are no subscription fees or microtransactions. At $99.99, the ball is not cheap — but the app will work for free, for as long as the ball does. It (along with other, similar products from Playfinity) is also currently 30% off as part of Amazon’s Prime Day festivities.
You can pick up the ball (and the other Playfinity items that are on Prime Day sale) at the links below. You can see the MLB All-Star Game tonight at 8 p.m. ET on Fox or Fubo.
GAMING BASEBALL: https://amzn.to/3D7qp7V
JUMPGAMES: https://amzn.to/3D724PA
SMARTBALL: https://amzn.to/3rr5WZl
You can keep tabs on all of ComicBook’s favorite Prime Day 2023 deals right here via out master list. Be sure to check out even more great Prime Day deals to shop, handpicked by our friends at CBS News Essentials, CBS Sports Essentials and ETOnline.
