Insta-review: Murray's Vanport Batting Cages

🧢 It's baseball season! Major league season is solidly underway and here at home where we don't — yet — have an MLB team, the Portland Pickles and the Hillsboro Hops are running 'round the bases.

• Might it be a good time for you to pick up a bat and pose?

🎉 Introducing: the Axios Insta-review.

• We try something cool.
• We give you our quick rating, including how to doll it up for your Insta feed.

⚾ Emily here. Although my seventh-grade softball coach graciously awarded me best sub, the only time I've been close to playing anything similar since then was about a decade after that — a couple rounds of beer kickball.

• Until I recently got invited to a batting cage birthday party.

The place: Murray's Vanport Batting Cages — two lanes on a fenced-in patch of grass near the sand volleyball courts at Delta Park, built where the working-class city of Vanport stood before a flood destroyed it in 1948.

• Address: 10737 N. Union Court. Park by the side of the road.

The main attraction: It's outside. You can see the balls running through the pitch machine. Sometimes really good batters show up. Also, there's a picnic table. BYOF.

Insta-rating: Friendly fun.

• For your feed: Rustic, sporty and artsy (see soft-focus chain link fence, above) photo options.

The bottom line: Murray's is on the ultra-casual end of batting cages. Open usually 4pm-8pm weekdays, Saturdays 11-5, Sundays 1-5, weather and park events permitting. But call ahead. "If it's slow or doesn't look like anybody is coming I might sneak out early," owner Murray Todd tells Axios.

• Office: 503-289-4487. Cell: 503-830-5139
• $5 gets you 20 pitches; $20 buys 100.