New Harwich Facility Brings Indoor Baseball Training To Lower Cape

HARWICH – Outside, frozen snowbanks tower above sidewalks, streets and parking lots. Grassy surfaces at parks and fields are smothered in expansive sheets of white that show no signs of melting. In less than two months, baseball will be played outdoors here.

Until then, the sport survives on the Lower Cape inside a Harwich warehouse situated among an industrial section of Queen Anne Road. Tucked at the back of that warehouse is the Cape Cod Baseball Club, which opened at the end of January and with it brought an indoor baseball training facility to the region. Before, the closest places to practice the game inside were all on the Upper Cape. 

“The word ‘finally’ seems to be a common word I hear,” owner Steve Almonte said. “Finally. Finally a baseball training center in the Lower Cape. Finally.”

Almonte, a South Dennis native, first committed to the space in late October. He had been seeking to bring baseball programming to Harwich since at least 2024, when he appeared before the recreation and youth commission that January to inquire about using town facilities and fields.

Since incorporating the Cape Cod Baseball Club as a business in 2003, his mission has been “to help Cape Cod kids with baseball however they want,” Almonte said. The new Harwich facility wasn’t his or the club’s first rodeo, having operated a training center in Bourne since 2009. But it took days of up to 16 hours for three months to put it all together for the January opening. 

The 60-by-40-foot facility has three cages — two tunnels with L-screens and machines for hitting and one throwing lane with a mound for pitching. There are spots for various drills, a weightlifting station and an upper deck viewing area. There’s enough at the club for a team of 12, according to Almonte, to all stay busy working and practicing.

“You just can't beat our program, our process or the people behind it,” Almonte said. “I've been doing it for a long time, and the collection of guys that work with us are just second to none. They're in it for the right reasons. They're here to help kids.”

Time in the cages is reserved through an app. The club holds programming in the space — lessons, camps during school vacations, clinics — that can similarly be booked through the app. The Cape Cod Baseball Club also offers a membership that allows 24/7 access to the facility and operates the Cape Riptide travel teams.

“There's something here for everybody from the most casual baseball or softball player to the most ambitious and competitive one,” Almonte said.

The Harwich training center is brand new, but for Almonte, the significance isn’t in the shiny equipment and fresh coats of paint on the walls, but rather the club’s people and their philosophy — one centered on wanting to improve by working and practicing hard.

“I love the facility; it’s beautiful and it's really well-equipped, but it's well-thought out by people that are well-intended,” he said. “That’s the deal here.” 

After playing at Dennis-Yarmouth High School, Almonte went on to pitch for Eckerd College. He’s played and coached in the Cape Cod Baseball League. The club’s director of hitting and player development, Bobby Sannicandro, once ate dinner with Ted Willams in the 1970s. Sannicandro and Almonte have a seemingly endless text thread where they talk hitting. Another instructor, Steve Ring, was a farmhand in the Detroit Tigers organization and managed the Harwich Mariners to two Cape League titles.

“I'm looking forward to the people here being happy about the staff that's here, not the facility that's here, because they're good people — knowledgeable, enthusiastic, selfless, humble,” Almonte said. “Just really great people.”

Those people are now on the Lower Cape with the newly opened indoor baseball training facility in Harwich. During a winter that’s shaping up to be particularly brutal, the timing probably couldn’t have been better.