Sunday, October 29, 2006
A Little Clubhouse Magic
Can a baseball team really be affected by clubhouse chemistry?
This term, “clubhouse chemistry,” is one that’s been thrown around quite a bit. Most sports fans and experts will agree, there’s a little more to the success or failure of teams than pure statistics. There’s sometimes no statistical way to explain the unforeseen explosion of a perennially bad team. Now, I don’t claim to be knowledgeable about statistics, so I may place an unnecessary amount of emphasis on the more social aspects of teams. Still, there seems to be some teams that defy all logical prediction. Take the midseason meltdowns of the Michigan State Spartan football team over the past couple of years. Here is a team who looked to have very few weaknesses, save for their horrifically ugly uniforms. They play in one of the most prestigious college football conferences, the Big Ten. They have a quarterback who’s almost certainly headed for the early rounds of the NFL draft. Even these things pale as accurate predictors when compared to the actual performance of the team in early season games. This year, for example, the Spartans jumped ahead to what seemed to be a blowout lead over the highly ranked Notre Dame Fighting Irish. In the end, Notre Dame came back and won the game following a colossal breakdown by the Spartans. The very next week, the Spartans had gone from a team capable of scoring easily on Notre Dame to a team that had lost to Illinois. I have no doubt that the “clubhouse chemistry,” the morale of the team, the team’s relationship with its coach and the relationships between the players of the team were the cause of this spectacular failure.
Since this is a baseball blog, it’s probably fairly obvious where I’m going with this. The Detroit Tigers, despite eventually losing in the World Series, are just one of those teams you can’t explain with statistics (or I can’t; I’m sure someone could). The whole was greater than the individual parts on this baseball team. Several of the players on the team this year during their domination of the American League were also on the Tigers team, three years ago, that lost 109 games. Certainly, the new additions helped the team; over the course of the years between the 109-loss season and the World Series appearance, the Tigers shed some players who were weighting them down and replaced them with talent. Kenny Rogers, Todd Jones and Magglio Ordonez are examples of these shrewd additions. You still wouldn’t think that a team with so many returning players from that infamous season would become the team to beat in the AL. The only explanation, in my opinion, is that the Tigers found the perfect combination of skills, abilities and personalities to craft a team out of a group of apparent non-stars.
So, can the Pirates pull off what the Tigers have done? I’m not holding out any hope for a World Series appearance in the near future, but I certainly believe that several of the players on the Pirates’ roster currently could help build a contending team; I’d like to see that team be built in Pittsburgh. A number of fairly recent Pirates’ trades have appeared on contending teams. For example: Jeff Suppan. His postseason performance this year makes me wonder what I missed about him when he played in Pittsburgh. Sean Casey, my favorite of Dave Littlefield’s veteran acquisitions before this past season, was the most competent-looking player on the Tigers during the World Series. So when people say that the Pirates’ young pitching staff look to develop into very underwhelming players, I like to believe that there can be a little more than statistics involved in the creation of a competitive player. It might take a little magic. Let’s hope that magic shows up soon.
This term, “clubhouse chemistry,” is one that’s been thrown around quite a bit. Most sports fans and experts will agree, there’s a little more to the success or failure of teams than pure statistics. There’s sometimes no statistical way to explain the unforeseen explosion of a perennially bad team. Now, I don’t claim to be knowledgeable about statistics, so I may place an unnecessary amount of emphasis on the more social aspects of teams. Still, there seems to be some teams that defy all logical prediction. Take the midseason meltdowns of the Michigan State Spartan football team over the past couple of years. Here is a team who looked to have very few weaknesses, save for their horrifically ugly uniforms. They play in one of the most prestigious college football conferences, the Big Ten. They have a quarterback who’s almost certainly headed for the early rounds of the NFL draft. Even these things pale as accurate predictors when compared to the actual performance of the team in early season games. This year, for example, the Spartans jumped ahead to what seemed to be a blowout lead over the highly ranked Notre Dame Fighting Irish. In the end, Notre Dame came back and won the game following a colossal breakdown by the Spartans. The very next week, the Spartans had gone from a team capable of scoring easily on Notre Dame to a team that had lost to Illinois. I have no doubt that the “clubhouse chemistry,” the morale of the team, the team’s relationship with its coach and the relationships between the players of the team were the cause of this spectacular failure.
Since this is a baseball blog, it’s probably fairly obvious where I’m going with this. The Detroit Tigers, despite eventually losing in the World Series, are just one of those teams you can’t explain with statistics (or I can’t; I’m sure someone could). The whole was greater than the individual parts on this baseball team. Several of the players on the team this year during their domination of the American League were also on the Tigers team, three years ago, that lost 109 games. Certainly, the new additions helped the team; over the course of the years between the 109-loss season and the World Series appearance, the Tigers shed some players who were weighting them down and replaced them with talent. Kenny Rogers, Todd Jones and Magglio Ordonez are examples of these shrewd additions. You still wouldn’t think that a team with so many returning players from that infamous season would become the team to beat in the AL. The only explanation, in my opinion, is that the Tigers found the perfect combination of skills, abilities and personalities to craft a team out of a group of apparent non-stars.
So, can the Pirates pull off what the Tigers have done? I’m not holding out any hope for a World Series appearance in the near future, but I certainly believe that several of the players on the Pirates’ roster currently could help build a contending team; I’d like to see that team be built in Pittsburgh. A number of fairly recent Pirates’ trades have appeared on contending teams. For example: Jeff Suppan. His postseason performance this year makes me wonder what I missed about him when he played in Pittsburgh. Sean Casey, my favorite of Dave Littlefield’s veteran acquisitions before this past season, was the most competent-looking player on the Tigers during the World Series. So when people say that the Pirates’ young pitching staff look to develop into very underwhelming players, I like to believe that there can be a little more than statistics involved in the creation of a competitive player. It might take a little magic. Let’s hope that magic shows up soon.
