It's difficult to adjust your swing for anything other than a fast ball with a pitching machine.

Though softballs are larger in circumference than baseballs, baseballs are more densely packed. This means that even though you have a bigger target to hit, it’s harder to generate the same kind of power drives you can with a baseball. For this reason, among many others, training with a softball pitching machine is quite different than training with a baseball one.

When training with a pitching machine for softballs, regardless of whether you use an ATEC or a JUGS pitching machine, you’re not going to get speeds much higher than 70 MPH. Fortunately, softballs are pitched in regular games at slower speeds than generally found in baseball, so training with 90+ MPH baseball pitches is essentially unnecessary. A good starter speed will be in the high 20s or low 30s MPH for most rookies, though that may change depending on your skill level and the quickness of your hand-to-eye coordination.

Remember, if you’re setting up a softball pitching machine in your own backyard, it shouldn’t be set up to follow the rules of a baseball field, if that’s what you’re used to. A softball field is smaller, and pitches don’t have to be thrown as far. A pitching machine can also be highly beneficial for another reason: many people only have strong arms for overhand pitches.

Though a trained softball pitcher can wind up and toss an absurdly fast pitch at a batter, it’s much harder to reproduce for the untrained. With a softball pitching machine, the other person’s level of competency in the pitching circle no longer has an effect on how accurate or realistic the thrown pitch is.