THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Its probably an overstated issue, especially the way it was described above. But just becasue you can’t measure something with numbers, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist either.

Having all chemistry guys and aging talent is a recipe for disaster.  Having all talent and no chemistry is probably better, but that’s why managers have ulcers and heart attacks, and quit the game.

Is there any way to set up The Great Chemistry Project?

Ron/1: “But just becasue you can’t measure something with numbers, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist either. “

Not a single sane person in the world is disputing this.  Therefore, it should go without saying.

The question is ALWAYS: to what degree.  The answer must be: pretty darn small.  Read the rest of Derek’s post for the reasoning.

I was starting to think this dragon was named Global Warming, sorry, strike that, Climate Change

Back on topic, I spent a few emails last summer arguing with Pirates announcer Greg brown over the acquisition of Matt Morris...Now I love Greg Brown, but Brown talked about the importance of that “veteran leadership” on the young staff, like having a second pitching coach - I told him IMHO that didn’t mean crap if he can’t get guys out, that Morris has had decling K rates for six straight years.

"Veteran leadership!” = “We can still be friends!”

Also- one could likely go out and hire a second pitching coach for less than $10.5MM/yr, I would hope.

I think that so-called team chemistry is a completely empty concept. In the first place, I’ve never seen an adequate definition of good chemistry and bad chemistry. By “adequate”, I mean instrumental definitions that would enable one to decide which teams have good chemisty and which have bad chemistry. If chemistry was well-defined, it would be possible to go through each major-league team and rate its chemistry.

The biggest reason that chemistry can’t be measured is because it isn’t defined. You can’t put a metric on something if you don’t know what it is.

Unless it’s pornography.

I might have read through this too quickly and not understood all the points trying to be made. If so, my fault.

It is probably an overrated issue. But I go back to my childhood when the Royals were winning the division every year, and had a “supposed” great team chemistry. I think talent is the most important issue, but I also have to think guys getting along in the clubhouse has something to do with it also.

Case in point: Jose Guillen being mad at this pitcher for not protecting him in 2004 and being left of off the playoff roster. You have to wonder how that affects a team.

I would love to see any kind of study done on this that shows anything for or against.

#4 and #6 - My thoughts exactly.

I think “good chemistry” and “good clubhouse presence” are always nice add-ons, but what’s problematic is when GMs start overpaying because of the good chemistry a player could bring instead of only his performance/projected performance (that’s looking at you Sabean).

I don’t think it is a huge GM “problem” (over or underpaying for “chemistry.” Teams do that to some extent and to some extent it is warranted.  Who the heck wants someone on their team who has a reputation as a clubhouse cancer, regardless of whether it has much of an effect on team performance?  Even I wouldn’t.  That will change the supply and demand equation a little.  It is mostly just silliness by the talking heads.

Hey, don’t forget that it was Bill James himself who (presumably with all sincerity) said that the reason the Red Sox came back against the Yankees and won the WS, was some kind of “chemistry” thing.

One more thing:

Funny thing about “chemistry” is that the storylines are often so predictable.  If the Mets end up not in the post-season, of course it will be because of bad chemistry.  If they do end up in the post-season, it will be because they overcame all the personal adversity and came together as a team.

If the Yankees have a good rest of season and make the post-season, it will be because of their experience and professionalism and because “you should never count the Yankees out.” If they don’t, it will be because age finally caught up with them, or that they don’t have the desire to win a championship any more.

We can write the scripts before the season starts and just have the talking heads fill in the names.

Oh boy, I get to actually use my psychology degree!  Chemistry really does exist.  Really.  There’s an entire industry out there (personality testing) that tries to figure out which types of people work well together.  There’s nothing at Retrosheet that will allow us to look at team chemistry.  Really, the only way that it could be done is if I went into clubhouses and made them all fill out MMPI’s or a Myers-Briggs or some other instrument.  (Match.com profiles?) And I suppose that it’s an open question whether it actually has some sort of actual impact.  My guess is that it would have very little, but that’s a guess.

The research suggests that instead of chemistry building success, success builds chemistry.  If you succeed with a group of people, you will generally feel good about them, because they helped you to achieve a goal.  I occasionally do group therapy, and one of the first things that you want to do with any group is set up some mild initiation ritual that everyone participates in and that everyone can do.  Start off by sharing an experience.  (Hence: every cheesy ice-breaker activity you’ve ever seen/been part of.) Build some little success.  It promotes people trusting each other.  (And when do people talk about how great the chemistry is and how much they love their teammates?  Right after winning the World Series!)

The other piece of building good chemistry is having group rituals.  It doesn’t even matter what the rituals are, and if a group has been together a while, they generally develop on their own.  People build communities.

Now, on an individual level, can a player be so ostracized from the community/team that he hates coming to work on a daily basis and his performance will suffer?  Maybe.  If everyone at work is a jerk, you learn to hate going in and you’re soon looking for a new job or a trade to the Dodgers.  However, consider an MLB clubhouse.  Figure that there are 25 players, a few attendants, trainers, and other folks.  What are the chances that you will clash with all of them?  (If you do, call me.  You have issues.) Consider the guys you went to high school with.  You were close friends with some of them (and still keep in touch with them), friendly with some, and gracious to most of the rest.  The last two groups didn’t get invites to your wedding, but they didn’t ruin your life either.  I’m guessing that it’s the same way in an MLB clubhouse.  There are guys who you get along well with, guys you kinda like, and the rest don’t really affect you.

Can one personality be so noxious as to ruin a group?  Yeah, I suppose in theory.  Everyone’s had a nightmare boss or co-worker (I sure have...) and most of the time you bond with the other folks around how much you hate that guy.  People don’t go around trying to find misery.

Now, does any of this affect how I perform in the batter’s box?  We’ve all had an argument one night and a bad day at work the next because of it(although some people even then throw themselves into their work in order to drown their sorrows), and the same effect might be happening in baseball.  But, if you’re the type of person who can’t somehow find something else to make you happy, you’re probably not going to make it to the big leagues.

I’m sure it exists.  The question is to what degree can chemistry influence you hitting a baseball when you are standing at home plate, or catching a ball and throwing to 1B?

Of all sports where you want to test the influence of chemistry, baseball is the worst such example.

I can think of a few that you could try: doubles tennis, basketball, maybe hockey.  These are sports that, to varying degrees, put you in close proximity and highly dependent on your mate.  To continue Pizza’s school analogy, if baseball is like a classroom of 30 kids, then basketball is like a team project of 5 kids, and doubles tennis is kids in a two-person play.

Start testing the influence where the signal to noise ratio is highest, not where the yapping decibel is loudest.

Why is there an assumption that chemistry is supposed to make a team win more, and if it doesn’t, then it doesn’t exist. Maybe the effect of chemistry is simply to make it more enjoyable while you are winning (or maybe even losing). That has value in its own right.

I think we’re all mixing two different types of chemistry.  There’s interpersonal chemistry (how much we like each other and whether I ask you to be a Godfather to my kids) and there’s on-the-field chemistry.  I’d say that could affect a player’s on the field performance a bit, but very weakly.  Most of the time, players talk about the off-the-field brand.

The on-the-field interactions (pitchers and catchers, SS and 2B turning the double play) do involve people working well together to complete a job, but I think everyone reading this has had a case where you have someone with whom you work well despite the fact that you don’t really like them (or hate them).  I remember back when the Indians had Robbie Alomar and Omar Vizquel at 2B and SS and they were said to have great chemistry in turning double plays.  It might have had something to do with the fact that they were both amazing fielders, but from what I remember, there was no BFF relationship between the two.  The on-the-field chemistry usually describes people being good at what their job description says, which is why they were signed to begin with.

"Why is there an assumption that chemistry is supposed to make a team win more, and if it doesn’t, then it doesn’t exist.”

Because it is usually invoked, by sports writers and fans, to explain why a team is winning or losing.

----"Because it usually invoked, by sportswriters and fans, to explain why a team is winning or losing.”

I understand that. But if you say to a veteran ballplayer, “Chemistry is a lot of hooey. If it does exist, the effect is so small that it’s not worth bothering about.”, he’ll say, “You’ve never played the game, bub. Of course it exists. Go back to your mother’s basement.”

But if you instead say, “Chemistry is real, and there can be big differences among teams. It increases your enjoyment of playing the game. And if you’re winning, it REALLY increases your enjoyment of playing the game."--you’ve acknowledged the player’s reality, and are allowing him to possibly have a realization of what the true effect of chemistry likely is.

I generally hate anecdotes, especially the personal types, but I played fairly competitive-level baseball, with guys like Jerry Reuss and later, Doug Mirabelli, and others, and I obviously had teammates that I liked and others that I didn’t like.  I also had teams that I enjoyed playing for and those that I really disliked playing for.

Baseball is such an individual sport when you are on the field (no matter what anyone says about “team work” or “team play") that I can’t honestly remember ever thinking about my team or teammates when I was at bat or in the field.  I always wanted to do the best I could just from an “ego” standpoint (and for whoever was in the stands that I knew).

And I agree that if your play varies with your attitude, you are not likely to have made the majors.

That being said, I think we all agree that your attitude can affect your play in the short and long run and that your attitude can be affected by the interactions among the players on a team.  We speculate that if you could somehow measure the effect on play, that it would likely be small, but we are not sure.

The important thing is that is has never been measured and would be difficult if not impossible to do.  And there is absolutely no reason to assume any effect of any size and in any direction without doing the requisite research.  That sort of ends the discussion.  We can speculate all we want about some things and at the end of the day all we have are a bunch of unproven, unresearched, and unsubstantiated opinions, which are not worth their weight in mud.

I can think of example where chemistry has helped a team put W’s on the board. Frank Thomas is currently playing at league minimum for the A’s (The Jays are paying his $8M salary). We could argue about how much he may have regressed due to age, but even a lesser Frank is still easily worth league minimum - even if just to find out if he can still bring it. (The last couple of games suggest he can).

I would think that Frank could have gone to several teams. The Mariners for one could use him. At league minimum how could you say no? But he made a beeline right for the A’s for essentially “intagibles” reasons. Certainly other teams get breaks like this due to “home town discounts” and such. The Braves seem to be masters at this.

Certainly, whether or not some teams consistently pay more for free-agents could be measured.

MGL, it’s actually not impossible (or difficult) to measure chemistry or cohesion.  There are scales that exist for exactly this purpose.  It’s just that getting access to the MLB clubhouses to hand out the surveys is hard.  If MLB would grant me access (and fund me...) I could conduct a study that looked at this particular issue.  At that point, it’s just a logistics problem.

However, there is literature on group cohesion (chemistry) and performance, both in general and in sports.  We may not have the exact data we need, but from the extant literature, which I must admit I haven’t read, we could make a decent guess.

I think one of the problems is that “clubhouse chemistry” and other associated terms have become code words for “doesn’t have a good relationship with the press.” Since the media is the intermediary between us and the teams, what information we have is filtered through them.

And players that don’t work well with the media often get bad reputations. I’m unconvinced that not getting along well with the media is indicative of not getting along with one’s fellow players, however.

You’ll also hear about “good character” and things like charity work mentioned in the same breath as leadership and chemistry. Again, I don’t see the two as being especially related. My mental image of a baseball clubhouse is rather reminiscent of a military barracks - no shocker, I’ve lived in quite a few and that’s where I draw my frame of reference.

But we’re talking about a hypercompetative, hypermasculine and very physical grouping of people that’s a lot different than what I imagine most people’s experience is. For example:

* How many of you could punch a coworker on live television and get a raise just two months later?
* How often have you heard of a womanizing bachelor in his 30s referred to as a role model and an exemplar of character?
* How many of you have blowup dolls in the workplace?

It’s a very different environment than most of us encounter - a lot of close proximity, guys showering in groups and generally living a decent part of their lives out in plain view of their teammates. On the road they pretty much live together. I think likability takes a back seat to some essential trust issues - what happens in the clubhouse stays in the clubhouse, etc.

So, yeah, I can see “clubhouse chemistry” playing a role in how a team does - we called it unit cohesion, and it was something that we paid quite a bit of attention to at times. But I don’t think it’s anything quite like what the sportswriters talk about.

Unit integrity can be helpful, but it’s not as crucial as it is for a SWAT team or ER room. 

I also doubt you’d get very far as an infielder if you threw the ball away because you don’t like the first baseman or the pitcher.

Coach-player relationships would probably be of more use anyway.

I don’t think someone will deliberately give away a play because he has a beef. However, if you hate coming to work, if your coworkers stress you out, you might find it harder to have the mental edge to put out a 100% effort. Maybe that would be called a mild form of depression.

Fear can also be a motivating factor - if I don’t get enough done tonight, my boss will probably be pissed in the morning, I could get called into his office, which might eventually lead to smaller or no raises, or even termination.