THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

In my experience of success in team environments, both sports and non-sports, camaraderie and chemistry are different things.  Camaraderie is absolutely not necessary for success; like Joe Schultz said, sometimes you just all go down the drain together.  The success is more fun when the people achieving it all like each other, but camaraderie is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for it.

You absolutely have to have chemistry for success, though, if chemistry is understood as complementary skills and an understanding and acceptance of roles.  There are occasions, I think, when a different kind of chemistry takes hold, when the assembled team has emergent properties and becomes greater than the sum of its parts (it may be happening with the Broncos right now), but those are rare, impossible to plan for or predict, and not directly related to people liking each other in any case.

@1
I’m with you in other sports.  Often it takes a while for an offensive line or a zone defense to click because there’s a lot of synchronized actions that take place. 

But there’s much less of that in baseball.  On offense, its almost completely limited to elective baserunning plays and on defense its mainly limited to the battery and a bit with the SS/2B combination.

Yeah, baseball is pretty much the ultimate team-of-individuals sport, and the manager in baseball appears to have significantly less impact than the head coach in many other sports. Football is pretty much at the other extreme in terms of the importance of both teamwork and coaching impact. I’d say basketball is somewhere in the middle. Without looking it up, I’m betting NFL head coaches make a lot more than baseball managers, and I’d guess NBA coaches are in between, but of course that has a lot to do with revenues.

@1:

By your definitions, I think the media is referring more to camaraderie when they talk about team chemistry. At least that’s how I’ve always interpreted it, although I could be wrong.

Bad chemistry seems mainly to be an excuse when teams don’t win. I doubt anyone would have complained about people drinking beer in the Boston clubhouse during games if they had made the playoffs and won the World Series, just as they didn’t make a big deal about the players not being the best of friends on the winning Oakland teams.

As you point out, it’s much more important that the players act professionally on the field and do their jobs.

@2

Totally agree.  The only other factor I’d add is that a player may underperform his true talent if he’s being used in a role--platoon, say, or non-closer--that he feels is beneath him.  But I’m also having trouble thinking of even a single example of this, so maybe that’s totally bogus, too.

Okay, who’s going to tell Gibson that summary opinions without evidence are bull----?

Hank/4 - Sometimes teams known for internal dissension win (e.g. the ‘78 Yankees, or the ‘86 Mets). And the early ‘70s A’s Reggie talks about in the article.

NaOH/6 - - but if anything, Gibson’s comment comes in response to the example of the early ‘70s A’s Jackson describes, so that’s one example. Okay, not much of a sample size…

But also it *is* more reasonable to accept the prior that having good players is more important than chemistry or camaraderie without much supporting evidence. We already can quantify to a reasonable extent how good a player is by their numbers, and overall, teams tend to perform as one would expect from summing the contributions of their players.

I’m not saying camaraderie and/or chemistry must be unimportant, but I do think that to the extent that they have value, most of that value is already captured by improving or harming performances that we measure by other means. And it’s the measurement of those performances that we usually turn to when talking about guys “who can play”, so there’s overlap between the two.

If there is some consistent but real value (or detriment) to camaraderie and/or chemistry that is *not* captured by improved measurable performance now, then we’d expect some teams to outperform (or underperform) expectations based on their statistics regularly.

I would pay more attention to “camaraderie and chemistry” if the concepts were proven to be at all useful of predicting things beforehand.

If you could see evidence of it, and say “this team has 95 win talent on paper, but these problems will make them underperform” or vice versa, and prove that these observations bear out more often than not, then you’ve got something.

If it’s only used as an after the fact excuse then it’s useless to know about.  If Evan Longoria is off by a milimeter on either of his final game HR swings, or Chris Davis swings and misses in the 9th vs Papelbon, we probably never hear about beer in the clubhouse (I certainly had not heard a bit about it before 9/28/2011).

If Oakland in 1972-74 had played a little worse or run into a hot opponent in the first round of the playoffs, we’d remember them as a great example of a super talented team that couldn’t win because of bad chemistry.

To be fair, asking Bob Gibson’s opinion of camaraderie is like asking Andrew Golata what he thinks about boxers being penalized for low blows.

Stan Musial likely has the exact opposite opinion. Who’s right?

If we can agree that WE DON’T KNOW, then we don’t need to talk about this again.