You can’t take one item and expect it to do the same at another location.

I think that is a large part of the point of the post. No one knows how to predict chemistry. Despite what people say, even winning doesn’t always create good chemistry. Even if you keep a guy in the same place, the people around him might change, or he might just change, and now you’ve got different chemistry. No one knows how to predict chemistry because no one knows how to predict human behavior on a scale lower than several trillion people (First Law of Psychohistory, right?).

Or is it only children who think a team full of A-Rods would beat a team full of Ecksteins?

James is tilting at a strawman. Nobody (here at least) is saying those things don’t exist; nobody is saying they don’t matter. They’re saying they don’t matter anywhere near as much as they are popularly thought to, and vague terms like “chemistry” are often a crutch used by sports journalist to explain the unlikely or to invoke the mystical or poetic in what comes down to more prosaic thumping of an inferior team by a superior one.

As in politics we have left and right—neither of which explains the world or explains how to live successfully in the world—in baseball we have the analytical camp and the traditional camp, or the sabermetricians against the scouts, however you want to characterize it. I created a good part of the analytical paradigm that the statistical analysts advocate, and certainly I believe in that paradigm and I advocate it within the Red Sox front office. But at the same time, the real world is too complicated to be explained by that paradigm.

The people who think that way. . .not to be rude, but they’re children. They may be 40-year-old children, they may be 70-year-old children, but their thinking is immature.

Teixeira to the Angels for Casey Kotchman and minor league P Stephen Marek

do any of them have proven chemistry?