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Mike Sonne likes to joke that his family members are terrible Canadians.
They don’t care much, if at all, for hockey. But they love baseball. When Sonne was a kid, it became a tradition to attend a Blue Jays game on his birthday. After moving from Toronto to Windsor, Ontario, all that separated them from a big-league game was the Detroit River and roughly three miles to the Tigers ballpark.
“I was a baseball fan,” Sonne told the Tribune, “and then it became evident that there was so much publicly available baseball data that I could start testing hypotheses and do those nerdy things that I love to do.”
His unique baseball journey brought him to the Chicago Cubs. Sonne initially connected with the team through assistant general manager and director of pitching Craig Breslow in 2019.
Sonne spoke to the pitching group during an organizational education week held annually in January, when the Cubs bring in external experts to discuss industry trends, what the private sector is working on and how to integrate some of that information into their best practices.
Sonne’s academic background, intellect and humility impressed Breslow and the Cubs.
“His ability to introduce some biomechanical concepts in really digestible ways to players and staff on site in real time was really helpful,” Breslow told the Tribune. “And it just became clear that the natural progression here was going to be a full-time role.”
In October, Sonne joined the Cubs as a baseball scientist after spending the 2022 season as a consultant with the team.
“He’s such a bright guy,” president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer told the Tribune. “He’s so inquisitive, and he’s a guy that we felt has real potential to gain competitive advantages. He’s great to have around — he can have a huge impact.”
Sonne, 39, earned a bachelor’s degree in kinesiology and a master’s in ergonomics from the University of Windsor and a Ph.D. in biomechanics at McMaster University. His Ph.D. thesis focused on assessing and predicting muscle fatigue in the workplace, mainly with assembly-line workers.
He applied that to ergonomics within baseball after Major League Baseball announced it would test a pitch clock in Double A and Triple A during the 2015 season. Sonne’s model was able to predict the increase in pitcher fatigue.
The findings of his study were published in a 2016 edition of the Journal of Sports Sciences. At that time, Sonne also started writing for FanGraphs and Baseball Prospectus’ Blue Jays site, and later for The Athletic, with a focus on melding data and models to project and analyze pitchers’ future performance.
He took his research a step further just as the pandemic hit in 2020. He used markerless motion capture to analyze pitching through ergonomics, aiming to understand workload and postures in baseball. It led to the development of PitchAI, a single-camera motion capture system that tracks 3D biomechanics for pitchers. Driveline Baseball is among the partners of ProPlayAI, which Sonne co-founded.
“Capturing human movement data was always one of the most challenging things because either the data were super noisy, they weren’t reliable or the equipment was super expensive,” Sonne said. “But nowadays, we all have a smartwatch or a cellphone and you can collect so much data just from regular everyday technology that everybody has.
“And acquiring that much data in a very short period of time, now all of a sudden we’ve got all this data that we need to understand, and I think that’s why you’re seeing such an influx of human movement sciences in baseball.”
Collaborative effort
Adding a position like Sonne’s had been on the Cubs’ radar for a while as the sport moved more into the biomechanical space. They wanted to find the right person, though, and not force it. Sonne’s expertise in biomechanics and applied ergonomics and his connection with Cubs players and coaches as a consultant this year made him the ideal fit.
Canada remains Sonne’s home base, but he will travel regularly to Chicago; Mesa, Ariz.; and the team’s minor-league affiliates.
“The most exciting thing about working for a team is the chance to have an idea, test your hypothesis and then see if it results in winning more games,” Sonne said. “It’s a really contained ecosystem where you can see results, and those results can make an entire city extremely happy if you do it right. That’s probably the biggest reward you could get.”
The Cubs’ efforts to build on baseball sciences — a division within their research and development department — extend beyond bringing in Sonne. They want to enhance an already robust R&D department and continue to supplement a coaching staff eager for any data and information that can help players.
“We’re finding that if we allow perfect to be the enemy of good, if we wait for some unanimity or consensus on what to do with this information, we’ll have lost our window to leverage a competitive advantage,” Breslow said. “Instead, we just have to cross a critical threshold and say we have confidence that taking this to a player is going to make them better, let’s do it. And if it turns out that it didn’t, let’s pivot and adjust and be humble enough to recognize that.”
The Cubs’ baseball sciences subdepartment is more of a collaborative space than a set number of people working within the division. Some will be predominantly devoted to this space when the group could be operating in a more traditional analytical or R&D capacity, whether focusing on the day-to-day elements or working on big-picture projects.
But the Cubs don’t see a wall around that domain. Other areas and job titles within the organization are expected to intersect at times. That might mean pitching and hitting coaches or strength and conditioning coaches, such as Arizona Complex League strength coach John Abbott, who was a doctoral fellow and earned a Ph.D. in sport physiology and performance at East Tennessee State in 2020, being involved with baseball science.
Their work won’t be limited to pitchers. Although a lot of hitting metrics have emerged in the last decade relating to launch angle and exit velocity, the hitting side is in some ways working backward in trying to answer performance-related questions: What does a good batted-ball profile look like and what do those properties entail? What is driving the path of the bat?
The expectation is at some point the production of force and transfer of momentum through a player’s body to hit, throw or run will help the Cubs better understand the way one’s body works with the ground. Breslow believes the gap is narrowing between pitchers and hitters with an influx of technology on the market relating to swing mechanics and swing properties through hitting labs and force plates.
Everything ties together for how the Cubs want to help players.
“At times, R&D departments can get bogged down in the academic perspective or the academic approach and we lose sight of the applied or practical importance of bringing things to our players and actually making them better,” Breslow said. “And this kind of baseball science space lives at that intersection where a lot of the information that’s coming is relevant in multiple domains. It’s bringing departments and subdepartments together.”
Motivated by unknowns and looming pitch clock
Breslow and Sonne stayed in touch over the years since first crossing paths in 2019. They bounced around ideas, with Sonne bringing an academic perspective, including how to weigh the impact of a reliever warming up in the bullpen but not entering the game and the optimal availability of a reliever in conjunction with necessary recovery time.
This type of data and research requires nuance. The Cubs have worked internally to build out a model that evaluates a variety of optimization and recovery scenarios for pitchers. Among them are the cost of using a pitcher in a game versus giving him a chance to recover; pushing a starter to go an extra inning or batter or even throwing an extra 10 to 15 pitches; and the value of a pitcher getting an extra day of rest compared with throwing on shorter rest.
MLB’s implementation of a pitch clock for the 2023 season adds another wrinkle. Pitchers will have a 30-second timer between batters, a 15-second timer with the bases empty and a 20-second timer with runners on base.
Beyond improving pace of play, the pitch clock will affect pitchers’ fatigue. How much and to what degree is something the Cubs want to research and evaluate.
Breslow compared the potential impact to someone doing squats or a jumping exercise. If asked to jump as high as possible followed by 30 seconds of rest and then again attempting to jump to max height with 15 seconds of rest afterward, those 15 seconds of rest wouldn’t be enough for the body to recover. The Cubs want their pitchers’ preparation for the season to include adjusting to these new conditions.
“People don’t really think of an individual pitch as exhausting as some of those other things, but the reality is it is or it is at some point,” Breslow said. “At some point you reach some threshold, and we’re not thinking about that.
“So I do think it should affect how we train, how we prepare, ways that we can create the adaptations that we’re looking for such that we can work under the time constraints that will be demanded of us by the rule changes.”
An emerging area like baseball sciences inherently endures challenges. Prioritizing data can be difficult when not knowing for certain it will have an impact for players on the field. Disagreements could arise in how to prioritize projects.
“So much of this is driven by ‘we don’t know what we don’t know yet,’ and oftentimes things that seem apparent, when you really take a closer look at the data, they’re really noisy,” Breslow said. “Everyone has questions. Everyone has ideas. Everyone wants to know how to explain velocity generation or command, and if those answers were so clear and so achievable, we probably would already have them.”
Those unknowns can motivate teams like the Cubs to be on the forefront of this data and technology.
“This group is willing to take chances,” Sonne said. “They will look at every possible opportunity to make the team better, and sometimes that involves bringing in people that have very different backgrounds to do it. And that’s really exciting.”
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