Do Baseball Players Even Know What "Chemistry" Means?

"We had our Moneyball movie, and they didn't even win…How about let's make a movie about the good ol' fashioned baseball people, and how they judge team chemistry, and put together guys that fit in. How about a movie about a team that actually wins in the end?"

The above quote comes courtesy of Jake Peavy as told to USA Today's Bob Nightengale in an article published yesterday that made a lot of people upset.

You've read this article before, even if you haven't perused this particular version. It's about chemistry and the idea that, despite baseball being the sport that is by far easiest to contextualize in hard data, strong interpersonal relationships can explain how and why teams perform well.

The path of least resistance would be to pile on Nightengale, but in this case he's giving voice to an ideology that prominent people within the sport fervently believe. The story isn't what one columnist thinks, it's that players like David Price, John Lackey, C.C. Sabathia and especially Peavy feel compelled to provide testimony about the power of the clubhouse.

Their tone is important as well: This reads far less like a sermon than an especially aggressive protest. However strongly Price feels about the subject, there's no need for one of the half-dozen best pitchers on the planet to become adversarial and declare that "people that don't understand what team chemistry means don't work in baseball." A two-time World Series winner like Lackey—who has accomplished everything necessary on the field of play —does not need to pop off about how "the numbers guys can't quantify that one, so they don't want to believe in it." Peavy, who was nothing short of hell-raising at his peak and part of the last two Series winners, isn't proving anything when he goes on soliloquies like this:

"I think we're losing part of our game because so many of these people in charge don't have the scouting background or playing background. All they have is a great education and they're really good at math. Some of these front offices crunch all of these numbers, and think they've got it all figured out… You can have all of the education you want, and break down every number you want, but unless you get to know what's inside a player, you really don't know the player."

All this amounts to is verbal feather-dusting for tired, false dichotomies. Of course human performance and psychology play a role in athletic endeavors—this is so obvious that it shouldn't even need to be said. For that matter, it's also obvious that humans benefit from sharing a workspace with people they consider friends. No one really argues that baseball players are thoughtless automatons engineered by Skynet.

That these players insist on rebutting speaks more to their own worldview than anyone else's; it represents an eagerness to remain willfully ignorant of how their sport actually operates. There is, for instance, an extended defense of veteran Cubs catcher David Ross, which crescendos with Anthony Rizzo rhapsodizing that Ross "means so much to everyone here" and features Peavy noting that Ross can't even hit his bodyweight before wondering aloud how Ross was supposedly offered multiple two-year deals in free agency.

The answer is that, according to Fangraphs, Ross has been a defensive plus in every season of his 13-year major league career; he's currently on pace for 7.4 defensive runs above average, which would be represent his highest total since 2011. The more practical explanation is that, for the last three years, Ross has caught Jon Lester and for however tangential clubhouse chemistry may be toward a winning product, a strong pitcher-catcher rapport can be indispensable. It certainly doesn't hurt that, for all we know, he's herding the Chicago's crush of precocious young talent like feral cats. But it doesn't move the meter nearly as much as his glove or their bats.

Or, take this Price defense of the Cardinals:

"The Cardinals are the same way. They definitely have talent, but they're no more talented than a lot of the teams they're beating every day… The Cardinals are unbelievable. They lose their ace (Adam Wainwright). They lose their No. 3 and No. 4 hitters in (Matt) Adams and (Matt Holliday). And they're still winning. They're just unreal."

To be clear, the Cardinals are winning because, even without Wainwright, their pitching staff ranks first in the majors in ERA, FIP, and WAR. For this, they can credit their vaunted pitching pipeline, which has spit out Michael Wacha, Carlos Martinez, Lance Lynn and Jaime Garcia for reasons that have far more to do with player development and high groundball percentages than jovial in-flight card games. They've withstood the loss of Holliday—who, thanks to the lowest isolated power numbers of his career and an inflated BABIP, was likely ticketed for his worst offensive season in years anyhow—because rookie Randal Grichuk is slugging .561 (in an admittedly small sample). And losing Adams was addition by subtraction; he produced 21 percent less offense than the average MLB player, and since the start of the 2014 season is hitting a putrid .190 against lefties. Contrary to Price's belief, the Cardinals are winning precisely because they have a deeper well of talent than all but a handful of other organizations.

What's most strange about this is the reluctance for everyone quoted to use talent as its own defense. It would be very easy, and very accurate, to waylay all claims about the Royals' legitimacy as a baseball powerhouse by pointing out that they have more range in the field than Beyonce has octaves, or even a simple, "Dat bullpen, tho." Instead, Price jabbers on about how "you can tell how close they are by watching them." The Giants won each of their three World Series on the crest of a dominant postseason ace, be it Tim Lincecum in 2010, Matt Cain in 2012 or Madison Bumgarner in 2014. Yet rather than point that out, we get Sabathia prattling on about, "you look at the Giants. Those guys love each other, and they win."

There's a way to construe all of this as a form of misguided altruism—that baseball is a family in which every person matters, no matter how talented, and these players are reminding us of that fact. But functionally speaking, it amounts to throwing a tarp of false modesty over a field of what is either misunderstanding, or insecurity, or both. It's hard to read it as anything else when Sabathia, literally on his last leg and consequently unable to positively affect games outside the clubhouse walls, offers absolutisms like, "if you have good clubhouse chemistry, you're going to win"—as though every single bad team is predisposed to misery. It's how Peavy comes off when he leans on old stereotypes to dismiss information that Zack Greinke, to cherry pick one analytically inclined player, has used to augment the majors' lowest ERA for a starting pitcher.

Of course, arm talent has far more to do with Greinke's success than either data or chemistry. This isn't a zero-sum game; those outside factors certainly play a role. But it's telling that Alex Anthopoulos, even his own zeal to describe how his Blue Jays were "looking for a special type of player," made sure to tack on, "I think it's important David Price fit into in the clubhouse, but let's don't forget he's got a (2.40) ERA, too."

"Just because you have all good people doesn't mean you're always going to win," he continues. "There are plenty of guys who have a 6-plus ERA who are tremendous clubhouse guys, but they're sitting at Triple-A."

The end game is the same as it ever was. Chemistry continues to matter in baseball, just as it always will, but—at least for now—many of the men who play it can't be bothered to slot it into the proper place. Imagining a world in which they all do? That's the most improbable movie ending of all.