One final thought I had thinking about this is that I can’t buy the premise of Baker’s informant — no assholes in the clubhouse. If true, they should bronze the benches and enshrine them in the Hall of Fame. It would be a first.

What’s funny is that’s a pretty good description. You can look through historical press accounts of corporate cultures, and you’ll find that they’re described depending on the stock performance of the company at the time.

Company does well = daring, employee empowerment creates initiative

Company does badly = directionless, without vision

Examples of that abound. It’s exactly the same thing for teams. If teams do well, coverage finds reasons they did well. If they do badly, reasons are found for why they did badly. Players hate each other?

Team’s doing well: they’re playing great to spite each other.

Team’s doing badly: they’re divided and not playing as a unit.

Not that that’s exactly the point here.

If you can’t reliably measure, predict, hire for, manage or manage to any player or combination of player impacts, it’s pointless to use that as a factor in personell decisions, or even really to consider it.

2001 M’s — calm, steady Olerud-Wilson-Edgar.

2004 Boston — insane idiots.

“Chemistry” comes in all shapes and sizes. So the question is, can you analyze it to determine causes, to build it, to predict success from it.

My sense is “chemistry” gets used when people cannot explain failure. I believe the truth is that high-performance teams — in real work or in baseball — need some fundamental elements. Some things ARE critical and look the same across all good teams — maybe things like talent, insights and understandings from “coaches”, clear expectations, feedback on performance, control over your work, a sense from each team member that they and their role are critical.

But many, many other things can vary and can look wildly different from team to team — and you will still have a high performing team. I believe these writers aren’t thinking hard enough — they are too worried about these irrelevant, superficially different things that have no relation to performance, that inherently have nothing to do with causing or undermining effectiveness.

Screaming and breaking bats is unrelated to success. Being calm and not caring whether the fans like you is unrelated to success. As long as teams do the critical things — like get talent, coach it well, let the talent operate, provide feedback — that team will perform — regardless of superficial differences, or similarities.

So, I believe that the sabermetric community is correct here in not looking at “chemistry” — not because it can’t be measured, but because the superficial things people call “chemistry” have nothing whatsoever to do with performance. You have Edgar as a leader, and you have Manny Ramirez as a leader. Arguably, Carl Everett and Jose Guillen are the same guy — is one a leader or someone who builds the right chemistry and the other not? I would venture to say that in your work situations, you have had different-looking situations that worked well. MS, IBM, Apple all look different, all work. What matters — they have in common — what does not matter, they let vary and it does not matter (to performance).

The M’s failures are a result of the critical aspects of high-performance teams: talent and effective management. The non-critical areas: yelling or not, stand-up guy or not, cares what the fans think or not, “good” chemistry or “bad”, simply have nothing to do with performance.

So, why even talk about them? Sabermetricians haven’t failed to look at something important. They have correctly concluded that blonde or brunette, long hair or short, rah-rah or zen-like … it doesn’t make a difference.

Neither the win/profit or the leadership/morale issue is the chicken OR the egg. In the best (or perhaps, most sustainable for win/profit) they go together, working in complementary fashion.

And, you’re completely right that it’s hard to identify and make decisions based on something that’s really hard to predict. You’re thinking of hiring for a new position; one of the things you take into consideration is whether the person’s personality is a good ‘fit’ with your existing unit. The degree to which ‘fit’ is given weight varies and is dependent not only on whether you have all the pertinent known facts about the interviewee but also that you have a good understanding of the overall capacity/needs of your work unit and your organizational direction.

The problem with the Mariners is multi-fold. They don’t have a solid knowledge of organizational direction even at the smallest level (like valuing OBP) – rather, they shift it seemingly randomly and it’s not apparent.

They don’t have a good understanding of their capacity or needs for different skill sets inclusive of leadership qualities.

They don’t do a good job evaluating skills (tangible or not) of their interviewees.

Key point, really.

The team THINKS it can implement chemistry through player selection. Yet, they fail, time after time. The RATIONAL thing to do is to stop trying to do that; if you can’t implement it, stop wasting time and money doing it.

You think this crew will get a clue?

No – we dismiss it’s value as a decision making tool in building a roster, because no one has come up with a good way to predict its occurrance.

It’s another case of lived experience versus eyeballing stats. Most of us do not work in a sport environment, where winning and losing is so clearly definable, but we know from our lived experience that companies can be more profitable and productive with certain kinds of leadership in place, or certain kinds of office morale indicators. Equally hard to define in the office world, and terms thrown around like ‘walk the talk’ or ‘value and invest in their employees’ or ‘takes responsibility for getting the job done’.

We recognize the value and contribution of such qualities in our own lives, yet dismiss it on a sporting team simply because nobody has come up with a good way to capture or measure it?

We went to dinner together, went to the movies together, had fun together and finished in last place together.

68: Well, in New York we actually get more inches of rain than Seattle does, so the rain thing may not be the killer issue here that it is for Angelenos.