-
Here's a highlight video of my older son's pan-con baseball season and travel team games in 2021:
This one demonstrates the value of filming a whole game, as my younger son, Alex, gets four outs in one game on June 17. It would be impossible to capture those moments all on the phone and by hand. (I did capture the most of a throw, which you will see in the clip below.)
View of my DJI Osmo Action camera behind the cage mounted on a bracket thing I fixed up from off-the-shelf parts out of Home Depot. This is at Forest Hills Fleet Street Field 1. Feel free to use it to mount your own camera.
View from below looking up at the mounting plate, where you screw in the camera's mounting piece:
Frontal view of the camera mounted behind the cage:
-
Check out this clip of my younger boy's double he hit with his lob ball team, and setup pictures follow:
One tricky thing about soft net-cages is that you cannot fix a camera mount on the back of the fence. Since sometimes the kids are hitting soft baseballs, I'd encourage to use a GoPro-like camera and fix it on a clamp, which can grab onto a pole, like below:
Below is a close-up view of my DJI Osmo Action camera mounted on a clamp that clips onto a cage pole: (If they are hitting a real, hard baseball, then I'd NOT recommend fix the camera inside the cage.)
From outside the cage, the setup looks like this:
-
My older boy played a couple of years of travel baseball and I had to come up with a rig to set up camera quickly enough to film whole games, or doubleheaders. It's a bracket off Amazon, but it does take some time to get the hang of hooking it around the cage, like below:
This below is a looking-down view over the mounted camera and the bracket behind the cage:
-
I am showing this option as a backup. This is not something I'd recommend as the best way to film baseball, or other youth athletic activities. I did this many times years ago, and one phone fell to a sudden death on a cement curb.
First of all, you don't have a phone to use for a couple of hours at least, if this is your primary phone. Then, you will need to connect the phone to a battery bank to make sure it doesn't run out of juice while filming. And you will need to make sure you have enough storage to hold the full video. And many phones cannot shoot wide enough to cover all four bases. They may cut off first base or third base. I wouldn't want that to happen if you put in all the effort.
If you still want to go this route, here's my best way to fix the phone to the metal cage, using a bicycle phone mount. I got a rubber one from years ago that I still like to use sometimes. And I wove some ropes around the fences before clamping the phone mount to the ropes to make the whole thing stays there solid and steady (second picture shows before I fix up the phone mount):
