So What’s with Those Sports Bras Cubs Players Are Rocking in Early Workouts?

Photo of Evan Altman Evan AltmanJanuary 29, 2025

No, it’s not a fashion statement or a tacit admission that several players are suffering from gynecomastia after failing to take care of themselves since the end of last season. Those “sports bras” you see on young Cubs getting in early work at camp are actually GPS vests designed to track and measure athletes’ performance on the field. Already very popular in numerous other sports, these vests hold a pod between the shoulder blades that contains a 10Hz GPS, an accelerometer, and a magnetometer to capture over 1250 data points per second to measure how much and how hard players are working.

As with a great deal of other cutting-edge sports science — we’ve covered motor preferences here a few times — this latest innovation is a product of an Australian-based sports performance company called Catapult. Headquartered in Melbourne, Catapult was founded by a pair of engineers in 2006 with the goal of replacing lab-based performance testing with competition-based data collection. You don’t have to be an elite athlete to understand that exertion is going to be very different in a sterile environment than on the field of play.

The only problem is that the technology required to collect that data was either too clunky or required all manner of equipment to operate. The advent of microtechnology allowed Catapult and other companies to solve for that while also providing real-time insights to players, coaches, and trainers. Catapult’s vests are probably a lot more common than you think, it’s just that most athletes wear them under their uniforms during games.

“Catapult Baseball Analytics accurately captures swings, pitches, and throws alongside running demands in a single device,” reads an explanation on the company’s website. “Save time, simplify your workflow and manage the workload and physical performance of your players, regardless of position-specific load demands.”

Driveline Pulse — which my son uses — can monitor throwing workload using a sensor worn just below a player’s elbow, providing immediate feedback on individual and overall workload. Catapult takes that a step further by differentiating between pitches and other throwing events, even adding context for the type of pitch and whether it came from the stretch or windup.

In addition to information on throws and swings, Catapult’s vests track “more granular metrics for measuring directional acceleration and baseball-specific events.” That could yield a big step forward in injury prevention by detecting the onset of fatigue before players and coaches are even aware of it. Much was made of the recent MLB report on pitcher injuries, which was still largely anecdotal, but a big takeaway for me was how injury rates were much higher in spring training and then decreased as the season went on.

Being able to better monitor workload to properly ramp players into a competition phase — whether at the start of the season or following an injury — should theoretically reduce the inherent risks of any sport. It also makes for much more objective decision-making than the traditional “he looks gassed” when determining when a player should be pulled from a game or even practice.

To that end, the Cubs have also partnered with Japanese data analytics firm Next Base to aid in their injury-prevention efforts. Next Base will be at Sloan Park during camp to collect data on pitchers’ fingertip motion, ball rotation, energy efficiency, and more. This information can be cross-referenced with Catapult’s to provide insights that could not have been quantified previously, giving the Cubs a stronger foundation upon which to build their evolving development infrastructure.

All the data in the world means little if you can’t adequately ingest it and turn it into actionable steps for your athletes, which is where I think Tyle Zombro and other members of the pitching side in particular will be valuable. Rather than going with boilerplate workouts, the Cubs will be able to tailor each pitcher’s programming to his individual needs and preferences. That’s something they thought they were doing in the past, but much of that earlier work was based more on intuition and traditional methods.

And if we’re being really honest, there’s a point at which the attention to detail starts to lag a little bit. Without casting aspersions on the Cubs as an organization or any individuals on the development side, it’s pretty obvious that a bulk of the effort goes toward the top prospects. If you’re an undrafted free agent out of South Central Who Gives a Crap State, the chances are pretty good you’re just getting a recycled program from another dude who some scout thought resembled you.

While I’m oversimplifying things a little bit, it’s no secret MLB organizations don’t have the time or energy to put into every single minor-league player in their system. As this data collection becomes simpler and more efficient, however, the downstream effects could be huge. Teams can spend more time actually developing those unheralded prospects who might be late bloomers or may have been limited by improper instruction in the past.

When you understand more about motor preferences, you begin to see how what you thought were tried-and-true methods were really just biased toward a certain preference. What works for one player may not work for another, but so many coaches employ the same structures for everyone in their program and then wonder why it doesn’t work for some. I spoke with a scout recently who, when presented with the idea of motor preferences, immediately questioned how many players he’d f—ed up in the past because his teaching and observation were inherently biased toward what he believed to be correct.

If an organization wants all pitchers to be drop-and-drive guys, it could either mess up natural tall-and-fall pitchers or bypass them entirely because they don’t fit a profile. Or think about trying to get a pitcher who naturally supinates to throw a changeup that requires heavy pronation. Looking at you, Justin Steele. Thankfully, Steele and the Cubs finally stopped trying to throw his offspeed like Cole Hamels and went with more of a split grip.

As revolutionary as this stuff is, we’re not talking about fundamentally increasing talent levels. Rather, it’s a tool to better direct decision-making about individual players’ workouts and workloads. That should indeed yield an uptick in performance, but it’ll be on a more incremental level. The big aha for me is that Catapult and Next Base should vastly improve the Cubs’ efficiency when it comes to player evaluation and development planning.

That’s a necessity with organizational rosters being more restricted than in the past, forcing teams to get away from fishing with a net and hoping to get enough quality out of their quantity. I talk a lot about ceilings and floors here, maybe to the point that it’s become a lazy analogy, but I’ve written enough that a little laziness here at the end is warranted. My initial thought is that this will slightly raise the Cubs’ organizational ceiling while markedly improving the floor by allowing more focus to be placed on those players outside the 40-man roster and top 30 prospects.

Expect to hear more about these topics in the future, as I’m a huge nerd for this stuff.

Photo of Evan Altman Evan AltmanJanuary 29, 2025
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