Intangibles

“Let me tell you this,” he said. “Good veteran players are the best tonic your team could have. The younger players see that if the veteran players believe in the program, they’ll follow suit. But if you get veteran players that are pissed off they can’t play anymore, that’s the worst scenario you can have.”

Wasn’t he saying that factors beyond talent can affect how a team performs?

Tony La Russa, another Hall of Fame manager, would give a resounding yes. La Russa was still coaching the St. Louis Cardinals in April of 2010 when we talked in the visitor’s dugout at AT&T Park. He had won two World Series championships by then and would notch a third in 2011, his final season as a manager. Intense and declarative about most things and particularly so about team chemistry, La Russa has been honing his understanding of the concept since his first managerial job in 1979.

“If you think players can be around each other every day for eight months and it doesn’t matter what the vibes are between them, you’re foolish,” he said.

Get him going about team chemistry and he’s like Elmer Gantry delivering a TED Talk, preaching its power in detailed themes and sub-themes with examples and supporting evidence. In short, he said, chemistry can be distilled to three values: respect, trust, and caring. He drills those values into his players. He recruits and mentors team leaders to model and evangelize them in the clubhouse.

“The larger that leadership group, the better it is for the team and each individual. [Former manager] Chuck Tanner said if you have good chemistry, it’s like you traded for a superstar, and I believe it.”

That same season I spoke with La Russa, the San Francisco Giants were beginning to emerge as what some might call a case study in chemistry. Manager Bruce Bochy referred to his 2010 club as “a band of misfits” and “the Dirty Dozen.” No one predicted these cast-off veterans and unproven youngsters would end up on a cool Wednesday in November riding trolley cars up Market Street through a shower of confetti. However, despite having witnessed this unlikely championship season firsthand, I was no closer to understanding the dynamics of team chemistry than I was driving home from the ’89 team reunion a year earlier.

That December, I went to Orlando for Major League Baseball’s winter meetings, the annual gathering of managers, general managers, executives, and media (plus out-of-work baseball people looking for jobs). I was learning a ton about clubhouse behavior and relationships, and how folks inside baseball perceived chemistry. But I still had a thousand questions.

How do we know team chemistry actually exists? If it exists, what is it? Is it similar to romantic chemistry, some magical connection that happens among and between certain human beings? And how does it affect performance? After all, why even talk about team chemistry if it doesn’t affect performance?

My search for answers split into two strands that curled around each other like a double helix. One revolved around the friendships, resentments, humor, fights, ego, and humility in the clubhouse, the other around the science of how and why such things matter to performance.

Both, however, start in the only place they can: the human brain.

CHAPTER ONE

YOU COMPLETE ME

Two doors down from the No Name Bar in Sausalito, California, sandwiched so tightly between two tourist shops I almost miss the entrance, is the office of UC San Francisco psychiatrist and psychotherapist Thomas Lewis. He’s the principal author of A General Theory of Love,* a beautiful mindblower of a book that includes this sentence:

“[No human] is a functioning whole on his own; each has open loops that only somebody else can complete.”

As we know from the orphanage studies and cases like my father’s, the human brain, for all its power and complexity, does not come preprogrammed with everything necessary to live. But that’s not the open loop Thomas Lewis is talking about.

Mammals need other mammals to flourish, and humans most of all. I remembered enough from high-school science to know that early humans evolved into one of the most social, cooperative species on earth because, of course, they needed each other to stay alive. They weren’t fast enough or strong enough to battle mammoths alone. Coordination required communication. Before language in our little hominid tribes, we still managed to let each other know where food could be found, which berries made you sick, and how to bring down a bison ten times your size.

Walking upright elongated our vocal tract, which produced a broader and increasingly nuanced range of sounds. With our face no longer covered in hair, facial muscles became visible. We learned to “read” the messages embedded in the variety of muscle combinations, particularly around the eyes: worry, joy, fear, confusion, surprise. We could now see the blush of embarrassment and the flush of love. Our largely hairless body, with eighteen square feet of exposed skin, became a soft keyboard for the language of touch: I trust you, It’s OK, Stop that. Our eyes changed from almost completely brown — like the eyes of other primates — to having bright white sclera around our corneas, allowing us to convey immediately where we were looking — Pay attention to that snake over there! — and also enabling others to get a glimpse of our intent: deceit, kindness, malevolence. The big, jutting primate brow disappeared, clearing the way for our eyes to be more easily observed. Over the course of three million years, our brain quadrupled in size. This was an unusual development.

Brain size generally corresponds to body size. Elephants have enormous brains; squirrels, small ones. Ours are way bigger than our bodies would dictate. In fact, we have the largest brain relative to our body size of any animal. Anthropologist Robin Dunbar concluded that our brain grew so large not so much to house our intellect but to accommodate our massive amount of social wiring.1

The modern human brain holds around one hundred billion neurons, which are like the brain’s motherboard, ceaselessly downloading info from everything in our vicinity and routing it to the appropriate departments for processing. Our brain gathers signals from everyone around us — tone of voice, body language, odor, behavior — a “veritable dictionary of mood and intention,” as biologist E. O. Wilson puts it. Our face continually sends signals we don’t even know we’re sending. We have muscles in our chin, the bridge of our nose, and our forehead that most of us cannot consciously control. For example, if you asked people to pull down the corners of their lips without moving their chin muscles, only about 10 percent could do it. But almost everyone does it automatically when they’re profoundly sad. These hardwired expressions are almost always fleeting, disappearing behind the expression we want the world to see.

We pick up on the signals and react not only by altering our own mood and body language, but our heart rate, hormones, and metabolism — a thousand tiny recalibrations every moment. This is the dance of human tribes, each of us forever influencing one another with such speed and subtlety that we barely notice.

Thomas Lewis’s book never mentions team chemistry, but on page after page that’s what he describes.

“I know almost nothing about sports,” Lewis said as he sank into a black armchair and crossed his ankles on the ottoman. “I have patients come in and talk about sports, so I’ve heard about it, but I didn’t get that gene.”

Short stacks of paper formed a ragged semicircle on the floor around his chair. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves gave way to a picture window that opened to a view of the Sausalito Ferry and Richardson Bay.

Lewis had the soft and calming voice you’d expect from a psychiatry professor, but his husky build and Saturday-afternoon-at-Costco loose pullover brought to mind a hockey dad. The small table on his right was a clutter of three soft-drink cans, a crumpled coffee cup, and a half-empty bottle of mineral water.

Lewis told me about giving a lecture one day when a woman asked a question about heaven. He doesn’t remember the specifics. What he does remember is being struck for the first time by the near universality of people’s concept of heaven: a reunion with the people we love. Hell, on the other hand, is banishment. I thought about Tom Hanks’s character in Cast Away, who survives in part by turning a volleyball into a companion named Wilson. The success of the film depended on the audience buying into Hanks’s emotional connection to the ball. We did, even if we didn’t know exactly why.

“Relationships are ultimately the central thing for human beings,” Lewis said. So much so, he said, that we are often literally in sync with those closest to us. The heart rhythm (not heart rate) of a mother and baby, for example, will synchronize to within a second of each other. “And it’s specific to that mother and infant,” Lewis said. A woman’s heart rhythm doesn’t synchronize with a baby that isn’t hers. Similarly, the respiratory rates between people in a conversation, if they have a close relationship, will synchronize.

I understood the open-loop system in the extremes, namely abandoned children and lonely, isolated adults. But what about the rest of us in everyday life? What do other people supply to us that we can’t generate on our own?

“There are a lot of aspects of life that are hard to observe, I think, if you’re not a psychiatrist. I wonder sometimes, how do people get along?” Lewis said, smiling.

In a clinical session, he said, he is so attentive to everything about his patient that he notices how he is changed from hour to hour, depending on the client. “Everything about another person is contagious,” he said. “You can tell that a part of who you are in the moment comes from who the other person is. You’re not the same person. Not radically different, but different enough that it’s noticeable.”

I wondered what kinds of things he noticed.

“You just feel like: Oh, I’m funny with this person,” Lewis said. “Or I’m smart, or have more ideas, or can’t think of anything to say. You get changed. And that’s because part of who you are is determined by other people.”

I knew exactly. I also felt particularly funny with certain people. I asked Lewis if I was mimicking my friends’ funniness or were they tapping something in me I already had?

“There really isn’t a ‘you’ in the way you think there is,” he said. “There is a you that is unchanging. But a part of you is always supplied by other people.”

I had to wrap my brain around that. But the more I thought about it, the more I knew there was something to it. Who I am with my sisters and brothers in Florida is different from who I am with my friends in San Francisco. Who I am with my husband is different from who I ever was with boyfriends before him. Who I am with my son is totally different, for good or ill, from who I am with anyone else on the planet.

The chatter of tourists drifted up from the street. I told Lewis that there are people in sports who reject the suggestion that anything other than talent, training, and preparation account for an athlete’s performance. Lewis arched his eyebrows, which qualified in his range of measured emotions as flabbergasted shock.

“That,” he said evenly, “is very surprising to me.”

In early 2017, I was asked to interview Michael Lewis onstage for a Bay Area speaker series. His book Moneyball popularized the notion in baseball that if you couldn’t count it, time it, or measure it, it didn’t matter to performance. In other words, chemistry was as relevant as lucky underwear. He had just published The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds. It’s about the extraordinary relationship between Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, who summoned from each other such profound work on behavioral economics that it earned Kahneman the Nobel Prize. (Tversky had died by then, and Nobels are awarded only to the living.) Each was brilliant in his own right. But together they changed how we think about thinking. Lewis’s book describes how they supplied new facets to one another’s personality. The men could hardly be more different: Tversky was funny, self-assured, and sharply critical; Kahneman was quiet and, as Michael Lewis put it, “a welter of doubt.” But in Tversky’s company, Kahneman felt funny and confident, something he’d never experienced. With Kahneman, Tversky was agreeable and uncritical. Their relationship was about who and what the two of them became in each other’s presence.

In the green room before the onstage interview, I hoped to ask Lewis how and why these two men were able to influence each other to such a significant degree. I wanted to know if writing The Undoing Project had altered his thinking on team chemistry fourteen years after Moneyball. First, though, to break the ice I mentioned to Lewis I had been meeting with his good friend, a UC Berkeley social psychologist named Dacher Keltner, to whom Lewis had dedicated The Undoing Project. I told him that Keltner might collaborate on a study for my book.

“What’s your book about?” he asked.

“Team chemistry.”

“Doesn’t exist,” he said.

And that was that. I found this puzzling. If Tversky and Kahneman could change so markedly in each other’s company and elevate the quality of each other’s work, wasn’t it possible that any two human brains could do the same? Even two athletes’ brains? Perhaps the stumbling block for him was applying the phenomenon to groups. Yet history is rife with examples.

The “Lost Generation” of writers and artists in Paris after World War I — Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Man Ray, Pablo Picasso — inspired each other to take risks in their work, to be bold and audacious. The result was groundbreaking literature and art. The same was true for an earlier group of French painters whose cross-pollination of ideas and energy created Impressionism; and for Sigmund Freud and his psychoanalytic colleagues in Vienna; and for Charles Darwin and his network of biologists, geologists, and ornithologists in London and Cambridge who drew out the best in each other to hone a theory of natural selection.

By sharing knowledge, energy, motivation — and enjoying the discovery process together — the artists and scientists produced something more exciting than each could have produced alone.

I watched it happen with the Giants in 2010, my third year as the team’s media consultant. I didn’t exactly see it. I didn’t know enough yet to read the signals — embedded in voice, touch, facial expression, words, humor, nicknames, eye contact, a thousand things — crisscrossing the clubhouse like neurons in one big brain. I couldn’t see how this web of connections and recalibrations, this complex interplay of relationships, was coalescing into something all its own — a culture. And how this culture became like a gravitational force, bending everyone toward each other and a common goal.

For fifteen years at the Giants, prickly home-run king Barry Bonds was the bright, scorching sun around which the rest of the organization orbited. Three years after he left, a new dynamic took its place, turning two unlikely men into team leaders and a band of misfits, castoffs, and youngsters into World Series champions.

CHAPTER TWO

THE ARROWLEAF

“Trust doesn’t mean that you trust that someone won’t screw up. It means you trust them even when they do screw up.”

— Ed Catmull, former president of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios

Not everyone sees the thin layer of paranoia that coats certain clubhouses, but Aubrey Huff did, and right away. His history and personality had conditioned him to expect it. He reflexively scrutinized teammates’ words and tone of voice for the subtle derision, the hidden agendas. He was still in many ways the uneasy, awkward kid in Mineral Wells, Texas, whose father had been shot and killed at the apartment complex where he worked as an electrician. Aubrey was six years old. On weekend nights during high school, he preferred the batting cage behind his mobile home to the minefield of teenage social life, swinging the bat beneath the floodlights long after his mother, grandmother, and sister had gone to bed. He was the most valuable player at the three-thousand-student Vernon College in north Texas before transferring to the super-competitive baseball program at the University of Miami. He felt like a sheltered hick among the brash, frat-boy athletes. He adopted an arrogant, hard-partying, sarcastic alter ego he called Huffdaddy.

That’s the person I met when he arrived at the Giants’ spring training facility in January of 2010.

The Tampa Bay Rays had drafted him in the fifth round in 1998, and he reached the big leagues just two years later. In Huff’s five and a half years there, the Rays finished in last place five times. They lost more than a hundred games three times. Traded to the Houston Astros in 2006, Huff experienced half a season of winning baseball, though just barely: The Astros finished 82–80. Huff was twenty-nine. Then it was on to the awful Baltimore Orioles for two and a half more seasons of last-place finishes.

Over the years, Huff had become indifferent both to winning and to the team concept. He was not known for logging hours in the gym. He tended to show up at the ballpark right before stretching and was in his car by the time the stadium emptied. Go to the field, get your ass kicked, go home. At the start of each season, he’d hang a new calendar in his rental house and count down the days until he could pack up for the winter. This isn’t to say he didn’t play hard. He did. He played in all 162 games in 2002 and led the Rays in home runs for most of his years there. Good stats, every ballplayer knows, secured you a good contract. But by 2010, those days were over for Huff. He was thirty-three years old. He had never played in a postseason game. One could argue he had never played in a meaningful game, when the team’s fate hung in the balance. In short, he wasn’t a winner, on or off the field. In the midst of his three-year, $20-million contract with the Orioles, he went on a local radio station after downing nine Bud Lights and called Baltimore “a horseshit town.” He was traded the following season and finished out 2009 with the second-place Detroit Tigers. After being benched for poor play, he responded by pouting and stewing in the dugout.

“In all honesty, going into the off-season, I was thinking if nobody calls, thank god. I’m done. Just ride off in the sunset, and before you know it nobody will remember me. I was just totally over it,” Huff told me during a long phone conversation years later. He barely picked up a bat or lifted a weight that winter, before the 2010 season. He lurched from the strip clubs to the casinos and back home to his wife on a roller coaster of alcohol and Adderall. His marriage was falling apart.

As spring training drew near, the Giants had struck out twice on signing a left-handed first baseman who had some pop in his bat, and Huff became their best option. They offered just one year at $3 million — a lot of money for most of us, but a comedown for the ten-year veteran. Huff took it.

Only six of ESPN’s thirty-six baseball commentators predicted the Giants would reach the playoffs in 2010. No one at Baseball Prospectus did. The team had no slugger with the power of past Giants greats like Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, Will Clark, or Barry Bonds. In the pitching rotation was a twenty-year-old country boy named Madison Bumgarner, just two years removed from high school. Their ace, Tim Lincecum, a long-haired, pot-smoking, waifish introvert, looked like a bat boy but threw like Sandy Koufax. In his three years in the major leagues, he had already won two Cy Young Awards as the best pitcher in baseball. Their up-and-coming catcher was a crew-cut rookie out of Georgia with the Old West name of Buster Posey.

With Barry Bonds gone, the hierarchy within the team flattened. No emperor meant no minions, no one walking on eggshells, afraid of drawing the star’s criticism. The judgment fell away. Lincecum was a rock star in San Francisco, mobbed by fans, hounded by reporters, wooed by sponsors. He could have been a diva. Instead he was one of the guys, having a great time. Same thing for the other young players and the smattering of aging veterans, who understood how short a career is. They all wanted to win — and have fun while doing it.

What happened that season reminded me of E. O. Wilson’s description of an arrowleaf plant. When one grows on land, its leaves are shaped like arrowheads. In shallow water, they look like lily pads. Underwater, they’re long, seaweedy ribbons. The environment awakens something in the plant, freeing it to transform into the shape best suited to its surroundings.

I happened to be in the hallway when Huff arrived at the Giants’ Scottsdale, Arizona, ballpark for his first day of spring training. He strutted toward the clubhouse like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever: shoulders back, chin up, grin wide, as if crowds might part to make way. This was Huffdaddy, the swaggery guy with armor around his insecurities. He was girding himself for a fourth new clubhouse in five years. He stuck his head into a side room where coaches were drinking coffee around a conference table. “Aubrey Huff,” he announced to each man, circling the table and shaking hands like a seasoned salesman.

In the clubhouse, a few other early-arriving players were changing out of their street clothes. Huff knew they’d be well aware of his reputation as a shitty teammate. He set down his equipment bag at his locker and braced for the chore of introducing himself to men who might be less than excited to have him on the team. He was stashing deodorant and shaving cream when pitcher Matt Cain appeared with his hand out, welcoming him to the squad. Then Tim Lincecum came by. One by one, players greeted him. “There was an aura in the air, the way everybody talked to each other,” Huff said later. “The way everybody looked at each other. It just felt so much different than anything I’ve been a part of.”

Later, he watched as players from all different backgrounds squeezed shoulder to shoulder around a table in the middle of the clubhouse, slapping down cards in high-stakes games of booray and hearts. Huff remembers liking the eccentric closer — a twenty-fourth-round draft pick named Brian Wilson — with his black nail polish, Mohawk, and a black beard that would spawn half a dozen Twitter accounts. He also took to the sunny Dominican veteran Juan Uribe — plucked from the free-agent scrap heap a year earlier — who called everyone “Papi.”

“Uribe, what’s my name?” Huff asked one day, later in the season.

“Papi, you know I know your name,” Uribe said.

“No, what’s my name?”

“Shut up, I got you.”

Huff laughed when he told the story later. “He had no fucking idea what my name was. And it was perfectly OK with me.” Huff had his own quirks. He once ambled toward the clubhouse bathroom buck naked, asking if anyone had seen his toothbrush. It was protruding from his rear, a sight that broke up his teammates as intended. (“Now, the bristles weren’t in my butthole,” Huff made sure to tell me.) Later he began wearing a red thong under his uniform pants to rally the team out of a losing streak.

By the end of spring training, Huff was periodically joining the card games and lobbing sarcastic Huffdaddy remarks across the room. But he kept a safe distance. He knew he was just a replacement part and operated as he always had, like an independent contractor loyal only to himself.

Early in the season, however, that changed. The Giants were playing the Pittsburgh Pirates in San Francisco. Huff crushed a pitch to the right-field wall. As the ball caromed past the fielder, he rounded first and made for second. Already gasping for air, Huff tapped second and headed to third. His eyes bulged at the sight of the coach leaping wildly and waving him home. He chugged down the line and slid across the plate with the grace of a sandbag, completing one of the most entertaining and least likely inside-the-park home runs in history.