While the handsome high-ceilinged 6,000-square-foot building behind the popular Round Swamp Farm in East Hampton could have feathered a nest egg, Shelly Snyder Schaffer, its owner, preferred instead that it become a year-round hub for young ballplayers, boys and girls looking to up their baseball, softball, or lacrosse games.
“I wish there’d been something like this when I was growing up” said Vinny Alversa, the manager of the space, which Schaffer named Hub 44. Alversa, East Hampton High’s varsity baseball coach, remembers all too well the long drives to work out indoors in Bellport after school and on weekends. Now, there are reasonably-priced hitting and pitching clinics, private and small group lessons given by knowledgeable instructors, and half-hour and hourlong cage rentals just minutes away.
Schaffer, who is one of the reasons people who’d rather not cook on a given night flock to Round Swamp’s shops in East Hampton, Montauk, and Bridgehampton, said it wasn’t so much that she was a baseball or softball fan — though she does like Little League games — but her love for children, and her awareness that there was nothing much for them to do out here, that prompted her effort to build something lasting for them. She is a mother of four, two of whom, Nick, 17, and Alexa, 12, were with her that day.
Now, with her own 4,000-square-foot commercial kitchen in a building adjacent to Hub 44 (takeout menus will be available soon), Schaffer will be around kids forever, she said with a smile.
The origin of the name, she said, was “spiritual,” grounded in numerology — three successive 4s indicating that one was on the right path. Those numbers had taken on increased significance for her, she said, following the death of her father, Harold Snyder, in 2005. She substituted “Hub” for one of the 4s because she means for the building, which has six hitting/pitching “tunnels” within the carpeted 120-by-50-foot area, to be “a gathering place.”
Interestingly, the address of the building, Schaffer learned when she looked it up, is 44 — 44 Tan Bark Trail.
Larry Lillie has called Hub 44 “the Field of Dreams,” and there is a rumpled, barely recognizable baseball on the sign-in table given by him — the ball that Roy Hobbs literally knocked the cover off of in “The Natural.”
Also at the sign-up table is this advice: “Life always throw curves. Just keep fouling them off, the right pitch will come. And when it does be prepared to run the bases.”
Alversa is particularly taken with Hub 44’s multifaceted HitTrax screen that can, among other things, measure pitch speed and exit velocity, the flight of batted balls in every Major League stadium, display baseball stats, and, perhaps most important, can, via instant playback, break down batters’ swings. As for hitting, he tells the kids that 30 percent, while a dismal grade on an exam, is a pretty good average for a ballplayer.
Surveying the large, net-divided space, Alversa said, “It’s pretty neat — with our six tunnels, we can have three hitting one way and three hitting the other, or we can remove the dividers entirely and open the whole place up.”
He and Schaffer said that appointments are to be made online either through the website Hub44rsf.com, by emailing [email protected], or by calling 631-658-9038. Hub 44’s Instagram and Facebook’s handle is Hub44_east.
Adults are welcome too. A seven-week coed adult hitting league on Saturday and Sunday nights, beginning Saturday, has been proposed. Three-member teams are to play an hourlong doubleheader per week with playoffs in the last week, a flier says.
Another announces four-week softball pitching clinics that began on Dec. 22, and yet another advertises four-week baseball pitching clinics for 7-through-12-year-olds with Vinny Messana, a former all-state pitcher at Centereach High School and a winner of two Skyline Conference championships while at Farmingdale State in 2010 and 2011. Messana’s clinics are to begin Tuesday.
When, in 2002, Schaffer’s parents gave her the commercial lot upon which her kitchen and Hub 44 now stand, Nick was 6 years old and Alexa was an infant, and she didn’t quite know what she’d do with it. In time, she said, it became increasingly evident to her that “out west there are many opportunities that the kids here don’t have. I did it because there was a need. I did a lot of research on Instagram and Facebook as to the details, how much space would be needed, and so forth. And then, thank God, Vinny said he’d manage it, and everything fell into place.”
“It took two years from the time that we got the building permit and broke ground. It’s not a modular, it’s a wood frame building with a warm atmosphere, like a barn. The kids love it. It’s bigger than life to them. I love it too. This is the way I wanted it to be. I’m looking forward to what the future holds for our children and for the high school programs. It’s our turn to have an advantage out east.”