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One of the keys for a hitter is Staying Inside the Ball. It’s like finding gold in your backyard. Staying Inside simply means pulling your hands in on pitches middle in. If you hook or cast the bat head you’ll chop firewood with a splintered Louisville Slugger or dribble a lame groundball to the third baseman.

Until now there’s never been a piece of equipment that forces hitters to Stay Inside. But Skip Lindemann has the answer.

It’s called Ritend Bat Weight and Skip says it works more magic than Penn and Teller in Vegas.

A normal bat weight is a ring that circles the bat head. “When you warm-up with the ring the weight is on the barrel and it pulls your hands away from your body,” Lindemann says. “That creates casting and a long, slow swing. It feels like you’re quicker but you’re not.”

But here’s the genius of the Ritend. The bat weight is at the knob end of the stick.

“With the weight on the knob it forces hitters to pull their hands in,” Skip says. “It also creates a correct bat path that keeps the barrel in the zone longer. If you’re early you pull the ball, if you’re on time you hammer a line drive up the middle, if you’re a bit late you drill an oppo shot in the gap.”

Lindemann has a bundle of studies on his website that back up his theories. “Peavy Baseball in Atlanta and Louisville Slugger Hitting Science both showed Ritend can increase bat speed seven to nine mph. During our hitting sessions we see the same results using Swing Speed Trainer.”

The patent for Ritend was only finalized this month so Skip hasn’t pushed the market yet. But he says the Giants AA team is already using them and over 50 college teams are on board. “Sixty per cent of our sales are for softball because they’ve been teaching hands inside the ball forever.”

Lindemann’s search for his holy grail started when he was coaching at Plantation high school in Florida. “I was trying to find a way to get hitters to keep their hands inside the ball. We had a lot of kids who had never played baseball. My friend Robert Saven had an indoor batting facility and he brought me a CamWood bat. I loved the concept but not the price.”

He improvised. “I taped quarters to the end of an old bat and the kids really improved. But we were always picking up quarters.”

Skip doesn’t sleep a lot and when he was out running at four in the morning a bolt of discovery punched a lightning streak through his brain. Ritend was born. His brother, a mechanical engineer, made the prototype out of plastic and Lindemann sent it to his old hitting coach, Matt Fincher.

“If Matt didn’t like the idea I wasn’t going to pursue it. But he said he loved everything about it.” Fincher and Kansas City Royal Kevin Seitzer helped Lindemann develop the Ritend magic.

Velocity for a pitcher comes more from arm speed than arm strength and Skip feels the same way about hitters.

“I teach swing quicker, not harder,” he says. “When a player swings hard the shoulder and hips fly open and they drop their hands.  It’s a late and slow swing. Weak ground balls or pop-ups. But because the weight is on the knob of the Ritend it forces them to pull their hands inside the ball and be quicker.  And because of the weight it also makes them stronger.”

This one sounds like a winner. Score a double in the gap for Skip Lindemann.