AI-powered baseball training comes to Indy
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Young baseball prospects in Indianapolis will soon have their mental performance tracked, measured and trained by artificial intelligence.
The big picture: Boston-based tech company Pison is betting on its AI-driven neural sensors to revolutionize youth baseball training, quantifying the impact that stress, head injuries and other hurdles can have on reaction times down to the millisecond.
The latest: Pison announced Tuesday a revenue-sharing partnership with Prep Baseball, the nation's largest scouting service for amateur baseball.
- Pison's wearables will roll out early next month in Prep Baseball venues in Indiana and Kansas City, where more than 175,000 young baseball players practice.
Pison has measured cognitive performance in military members and ALS patients before branching out into sports.
- The company rolled out Baseball Pro earlier this year after partnering with Timex on making the device.
- In Indianapolis, expect to see the tech put into practice during tournaments, workout showcases and other scouting events.
How it works: Baseball Pro is a platform in a wrist-worn wearable that analyzes the electrical signals running through a player's brain and nervous system to their muscles.
- It can measure the impact that mental health, wellness and other cognitive factors have on baseball players, including their reaction time while batting or pitching.
What they're saying: "If you're cognitively declined, and you've got all the physical attributes in the world, you're not going to overcome that cognitive decline," says Marc Deschenes, a former pro baseball player and vice president of sports operations at Pison.
- But a player who is mentally prepared with fewer physical strengths can perform better than expected on a given day, Deschenes tells Axios.
Zoom in: Pison and Prep Baseball will track each player's cognitive performance as part of their overall stats.
- The player owns the data, and it will be up to the player to decide whether to release that information to a scout or college recruiter, says Pison CEO John Croteau.
Flashback: Pison started testing its cognitive performance technology for baseball in 2024 with five colleges: Penn State University, West Virginia University, Auburn University in Alabama, Oklahoma State University and Oral Roberts University in Oklahoma.
The intrigue: Pison's supercharged scouting tech arrives in Central Indiana as the digital sports training market explodes, thanks to an AI-powered push.
- A Technavio report released in October 2024 predicts the market to grow by $1.24 billion from 2024 to 2028.
What's next: By 2026, Baseball Pro will roll out across all other Prep Baseball venues, which serve thousands more players.
- A baseball coach at Lansing Community College in Michigan, another college working with Pison, plans to use players' metrics from Baseball Pro to make daily lineup decisions.