Kent company hoping its product replaces batting tee

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During the past few weeks, hundreds of thousands of high-school players, Little Leaguers, Big Leaguers, corporate softball teams and just plain baseball-loving folks across the country ran out onto the diamond, where they attempted one of the hardest feats in sports: hitting a round ball with a round bat.

It is difficult to turn a complicated equation of stride, hand-eye coordination, reflexes, balance, power and follow-through into what coaches call "muscle memory," particularly in a sport that allows three or four chances a game to get it right, or strike out.

That is where a Kent company hopes to make its mark.

SwingAway's sales reps are venturing out into the parks and fields of Major League baseball towns such as Seattle, armed with a piece of training equipment they hope will become as essential and ubiquitous as the backyard basketball hoop.

"Pete Rose hit a knotted rope one thousand times a day," said Larry Cripe, a former minor league ballplayer and founder of SwingAway, who invented the SwingAway hitting aid seven years ago in his garage while searching for a way for his sons to get batting practice even during rainy winters. "It's all about repetition, repetition, repetition."

The SwingAway is a portable batting contraption designed to replace the batting tee used since the 1940s. A regulation ball is drilled and anchored by heavy-duty bungee cords over a permanent home plate, giving the user cut after cut without ever having to retrieve a baseball, because the ball rockets right back into position.

Jay Buhner helped develop it. Ichiro loves it. Bernie Williams took one home with him after trying it out at Safeco Field last fall. The patented SwingAway, on the market for two years, is used by players or coaches on all 30 Major League teams, Cripe said, and the company is in talks with Ichiro about a possible endorsement deal in Japan. Major leaguers such as Jason Giambi and Rafael Palmiero can be seen using the SwingAway on the company's Web site.

Still, the company has existed on word-of-mouth with limited marketing, and even people who are entrenched in baseball have never heard of SwingAway, said Mark Zender, vice president of domestic sales.

But the SwingAway company is hoping to ride the Major League endorsements and the popularity of baseball to $5 million in sales this year after recording almost $1 million in 2001. The company, with 19 employees, not including outside sales reps, is in the middle of raising $2 million in funds from angel investors and a few unidentified Major League Baseball players. Along with the company's plans to open baseball training academies across the country based on digital-video instruction, the company projects gross sales of $75 million in five years.

"The market is there," said SwingAway Chief Executive Brian Cooper, who is also a founder and board member of Bogart Golf. "It's waiting for us."

According to Little League Baseball, there are 183,251 Little League teams worldwide, about 136,000 of them in the U.S. Washington State alone has 334 high school baseball teams and 336 high school softball teams, according to the Washington Interscholastic Activities Association (WIAA).

Cripe and Cooper emphasize that the SwingAway does not replicate the experience of batting. What it does is let batters loosen up and perfect the mechanics of their swing.

"This is not about turning little kids into Edgars and A-Rods," said Cooper. "All the players out there, their swings are unique. But they have the fundamentals."

Batting remains one of the most difficult things to do, and to coach, said Gary Clausen, baseball coach at Blaine High School and a WIAA board member. He said his team uses a variation of the SwingAway, but the older, high school-age kids sometimes don't want help from any hitting aids or tees. And there are a lot of them: the Ken Griffey Jr. Instructo-Swing, the Striker II, the Swing Rite, the Stridemaster.

"Our kids do not like to use the tee," said Clausen. "It's almost like an insult."

SwingAway's two models, the Pro and the 2000, cost $599 and $399, respectively, and are manufactured at the company's Kent headquarters. Clausen guessed that most smaller schools wouldn't have spring sports budgets big enough to purchase a couple of SwingAways for their teams.

"But if my kid was really into it, if he wanted to get swings in all year long, if he really loved the game, I'd probably buy him one," Clausen said.

SwingAway hopes to capitalize on enthusiastic kids with parents who don't have the time to work with them on their batting. Cripe said he wants to keep kids in the game; kids' interest in baseball starts to lag around age 11 or 12, when they strike out and lose confidence.

Zender said SwingAway sales reps are taking their SwingAway units out to the playfields and parks of America to get the word out "at a grassroots level." Also in the offing are infomercials and a plan to establish a national distributorship program.

Caitlin Cleary can be reached at (206) 464-8214 or at ccleary@seattletimes.com.