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.