Intangibles

As recently as 2007, the Giants’ clubhouse had been as cliquey and snipey as a middle-school cafeteria. Many of the veterans were on the downside of their careers and kept to themselves except, it seemed, to cut rookies down to size for talking to the media too much, playing music too loud, celebrating a home run too exuberantly. I remembered what Jim Leyland had told me:

“When you get the veterans to buy into the program, that is a treat for a manager. When the veterans don’t buy into the program, and they can’t really play anymore, and you have to start replacing them with younger players, you got fucking chaos on your hands. Trust me.”

By 2010, with the veteran cliques gone, a new openness settled over the clubhouse. “It’s given all the younger guys a chance to be themselves,” Lincecum said that year. “They’re not just in their lockers staring at the wall or sitting at the table not talking.” Players seemed to feel a sense of belonging and trust that allowed for lots of joking and honest conversation. They looked forward to coming to the park every day. They knew they’d have fun. And they were winning.

As I write this, I can almost hear the talk-radio voices leap an octave. “They aren’t winning because they’re having fun! They’re having fun because they’re winning!”

Yes, of course, winning is more conducive to having fun than not winning. The converse is also true: Having fun is more conducive to winning than not having fun. In that 2010 clubhouse, players ragged on each other with insults that, to me, would be knives in soft flesh but drew howls of laughter, even from the target. Nothing seemed off-limits. No one ever seemed wounded. Little did I imagine that this humor, as juvenile and crude as it was, showed how much they trusted each other. Successful teasing requires mutual trust. You trust that the target understands the goodwill you feel toward him. The target trusts that your teasing means he’s part of the tribe.

“Joking cultures are trusting cultures,” said social psychologist Gary Alan Fine, who has been writing about and studying humor since the 1970s.7 “You can’t have a teasing relationship with people you don’t really care about.”

Teams, like most work groups, are not made up of equals. Some have more authority, money, and tenure. But to function successfully as a team, everyone needs to operate as if they’re equals. Humor, especially teasing, allows stars and coaches to show they’re one of the guys or gals. “One way for a high-status person to be effective is to be willing not just to be the giver of humor, but the target as well,” Fine said. “In effect, he’s saying, ‘I’m a leader, but I’m not different from you. I can take a joke.’”

Fine points out the words target and take. They suggest incoming fire. When we good-naturedly suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous insult, we show commitment to the tribe. It’s a form of hazing. The teasing asks: Do you trust us, and can we trust you?

How does this help performance?

In a truly trusting culture, trust is as taken for granted as gravity. We are oblivious to its pull, to its effect on our mindset and thus our performance. Consider a high-stress scenario. You’re pinch-hitting in the bottom of the ninth in a tie game. Or you’re making an important presentation in front of your organization. As soon as our brain registers the stressful situation, our heart begins to pump faster. Our mindset determines what happens next.

If we trust that our colleagues and bosses believe in us, that they’ll stand by us even if we fail, we perceive stress as a challenge instead of a threat. Our brain releases hormones that cause our blood vessels to open up, delivering the extra blood into our brain and muscles to fortify us. Our body is primed for action. We feel emboldened to take risks that can push our performance to the next level. We don’t have to play it so safe because we know, no matter what the outcome, our tribe will be there.

The opposite of a trusting culture is organized paranoia. “You start over-processing everything, scrutinizing everything everybody says, looking for unfairness and criticism,” said Rod Kramer, a professor of organizational behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. “It’s a productivity killer.”

Instead of nervous excitement, we face stress with nervous fear. We perceive the situation as a threat. Our blood vessels constrict instead of expand, limiting the flow of blood and oxygen to our brain and muscles. Our body goes into a virtual crouch, preparing for the blows of failure. “The physiology of positive emotion is the antithesis of the physiology of stress,” said UC Berkeley psychology professor Dacher Keltner. “Stress wears you down. It makes you cautious. It tightens you up. You choke.”

By season’s end, Huff had more home runs (twenty-six) and more runs batted in (eighty-six) than anyone else on the team. The Giants advanced through the Division Series, the National League Championship Series, and on to the team’s first World Series championship in fifty-six years, their first ever in San Francisco. Anchored by Lincecum, young pitchers carried the Giants, but it was Huff who anchored the offense. He had become a fan favorite, a go-to guy for reporters, and an honest-to-god team leader. Aubrey Huff.

But he never played as well or had such impact again. The following year, with a new two-year contract from the Giants, his performance and influence eroded to the point of irrelevance. He had become a star, at least in San Francisco, with the indulgences and scrutiny that came with it. His addiction to Adderall escalated, as did his drinking. He had panic attacks — one so severe he left the team without notice and was gone a week. His wife had filed for divorce several months earlier, though they ended up staying together, at least for a few more years. (They divorced in 2018.)

When the Giants returned to the World Series in 2012, Huff was on the bench. He had just one hit in ten plate appearances. Then his career was over.

But for that one season in 2010, in that particular clubhouse among those particular men, he was a leader. His was an ungainly, stumbling kind of transformation, but in some ways as elegant and awesome as the arrowleaf’s.

The sun was beginning to disappear behind the trees at Claremont Graduate University. Paul Zak and I had walked to a small campus café, and we returned to the question of defining team chemistry.

“I think chemistry is a real thing,” he said. “We have a shared chemistry, and oxytocin is part of that. Baseball’s insane because of the number of games they play, right? It’s hard because you’re tired and exhausted, and what do you have at the end of the day? You got a team. They need you, and you better recognize that you need them.

“That’s the ‘I got your back’ thing. I want to know that when the shit hits the fan in the game, you’ll break a leg. That’s what I really want to know. If that’s the case, that says I need to be that kind of person, too. Otherwise I’m not a member of the team.”

He took a sip of coffee, gathering his thoughts.

“I would say that — maybe you’re going to laugh at this — but I think it’s that you really have to love the people that you are on a team with. In a really fundamental sense. From a neurologic sense, for sure. Also behaviorally. You have to take that three a.m. phone call when his wife kicks him out of the house. You got to be fully in as a human being, not just as a player, I think. Because it’s too hard otherwise.”

Every now and then, a player who is the embodiment of chemistry itself arrives on a team. These players carry much more than their fair share of the chemistry load, seeming to lift whatever team they join. I call these men and women Super-Carriers.

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