Co-founders Jordan Muraskin and Jason Sherwin’s business venture is a well documented brainchild — a neuroscientific blueprint to the cognition of hitting a baseball. Now the duo’s niche platform with a Ph.D. premise is growing up, but not quite dumbing down.
deCervo is becoming a product.
According to Muraskin, deCervo hails from Columbia University and was born out of his own Ph.D. Muraskin’s look into the brain function of individuals who had achieved mastery in their field grew into a platform that uses EEG technology to measure the reaction and recognition skills of hitters.
Early on, the path to profit was obscure. With an immense learning curve, and a visual component akin to the earliest versions of Pong, the platform certainly lacked moxie. Not to mention the hardware — a sort of EEG hair net — was a literal mess of wires.
But science reigns supreme, and deCervo certainly had a rock solid foundation in physics from which to build its platform.
“We had very rudimentary graphics, I mean worse than your earliest Nintendo set,” Sherwin said. “But what we were measuring was the neural response to those stimuli that are like what a player sees at the plate, and those we had simulated absolutely correctly. The laws of physics are the laws of physics.”
Breaking In
Let Michael Lewis’ “Moneyball” be a testament to the forward-thinking nature of the executives and front offices of Major League Baseball. Teams search incessantly for an infinitesimal edge over their competition, but the ears of decision makers are not often open.
“They’re very, very, very cautious, and you have to prove everything left, right and center multiple times over,” Muraskin said. “We learned early on that organizations are like battleships, and we’re not going to come in to the battleship and say, ‘Here, install this massive gun on your battleship.’ They’re going to want to test it. They’re going to want to install a smaller one first, and then upgrade it, and then upgrade it, and then upgrade it.”
Muraskin and Sherwin did in fact leverage and hustle their way into professional baseball.
The two co-founders traveled from complex to complex in spring training to demo the product, usually for no compensation outside an occasional travel reimbursement.
“We were showing and demonstrating what it was, how it would work, and why we were different,” Muraskin said. “Those trips were very valuable for not only collecting the data but also for us understanding where we would fit into the system.”
Over the last three spring trainings, the deCervo database has grown from having an extremely small selection of players, to having hundreds of data sets from rookie ball to the big leagues.
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A Three-Tiered Approach
Even the most innovative ideas must adapt on some level in order to survive, or in deCervo’s case, to succeed as a business model. The company’s product relied on expensive EEG equipment and required highly qualified individuals to be administered, usually Jason and Jordan themselves.
From their investment in R&D, and spring training road trips, emerged a three-tiered approach.
uHIT Mobile is an application available for iOS and Android devices that has user profile and data archiving capabilities. Paid users can store their performance history, compare their scores to their peers and professional players and level up as their performance improves.
uHIT Virtual is a lifelike VR experience that allows hitters to utilize their own batting stances. An opportunity for hitters to utilize wasted practice time to better their pitch recognition and reaction times.
Hey batta’, batta’. Shane, batta’, batta’. @ShaneBattier #uHIT #uHITchallenge #SSAC17 @SloanSportsConf pic.twitter.com/Y8pfwsFFAb
— deCervo (@deCervoProfile) March 3, 2017
uHIT Neural still has important applications for scouting and assessment purposes. Most notably, professional teams have expressed interest in using uHIT Neural to conduct pre-draft evaluations of potential prospects.
“We realized that we had to develop products like uHIT mobile and uHIT virtual,” Sherwin said. “With the mobile what you’ve got is the ability to measure how quickly and accurately the player is identifying pitches, but they can do it on the bus or they can do it in the clubhouse, or they can do it on the couch in the hotel. Versus virtual where they’re doing the same pitch recognition…but now they’re standing in their natural batting stance.”
Muraskin and Sherwin have reimagined the delivery of their core concept and the result is still innovative, but now it’s accessible.
“We started to fit the real nugget of the idea here, which is uHIT Neural, to the various logistical constraints that professional and even youth and amateur players have,” Sherwin said.
Intervention vs. Assessment
In its infancy the deCervo platform existed as a means of quantifying and examining the neural response of talented individuals. Assessment has always been at the heart of operations, but Muraskin and Sherwin are optimistic that their products will help hitters improve.
The company’s first partnership with an unnamed affiliated club was more a fact-finding mission than a quest for validation.
“We didn’t go into this with the ability to really look at this as an intervention, but we still looked at the basic analysis,” Sherwin said. “The longer they use the app…did they increase the number of balls they hit in play? And it turned out they did. Population level, everybody did.”
Sherwin was careful to make clear that correlation in no way indicates causation, but was optimistic that continued testing could yield more promising results.
“Assessment is always part of it, because if you’re going to have a successful intervention you have to be measuring what’s going on in the first place,” Sherwin said. “If you’re intervening without assessing, then you’re causing a bigger problem.”
What’s Next
Having successfully broken into the Major League market, deCervo’s next steps include broadening outreach to youth and academy level participants. With an arsenal of big league data, the platform now has the means and the intrigue to cater to a younger demographic.
“We want to focus a lot on coming up with the best of the best of the pro teams but (also) expanding the business all the way down to the consumer level,” Muraskin said. “Really grounding out a bigger business where we can help the 10 year old 12 year old kid who wants to get better, all the way up to the major leaguer who wants to just train on their own.
Not too far in the distance it’s easy for one to forge a connection between the deCervo product and a growing sensor and wearable sector. The platform’s bread and butter is assessing the cognitive process beneath the surface of the baseball swing — the precursor for the physical metrics tracked by swing sensors.
“I think definitely in the future that’s something that’s going to meet up,” Sherwin said. “There’s definitely a runway here in our tech roadmap that leads to integrating with swing mechanics, integrating with VR, and things like that.”
There’s plenty of room for growth and reason for optimism, but deCervo’s road to success still hinges on execution. In the end, selling a product based in neuroscience may prove to be a brain buster in its own right.