Chemistry? Yeah...chemistry?

When a professional sports team is playing well, almost always you hear about how the team has great chemistry. Conversely, when a given team is performing below expectations, you'll always hear about how they're not playing as a team, and how they lack chemistry. So it goes, if you fill your team with good chemistry guys, you will win, and if you fill your team with malcontents, you're destined for a high draft pick.

This argument holds some water, especially in football, where every piece is dependent upon another moving cog, and only when you're a well-oiled machine can you perform at the highest level.

But in baseball? What a bunch of bull-hooey.

Baseball is nominally a team sport, but in fact the game is built, more so than any other team sport, on an individual matchup: pitcher vs. hitter. It is all based on this mano a mano showdown. "Chemistry" will not make a splitter drop an extra inch, or turn a popup into a line drive. (Never mind the fact that chemistry, while entirely positive in this context, has no such positive connotation in real life. Afterall, sometimes in chemistry, things blow up.)

Right now, if you turned on Mike and the Maddog on WFAN (They're talkin' sports, goin' at it as hard as they can!), you will listen to 5 1/2 hours of disgruntled Mets fans waxing poetic about how the New York Mets "have no chemistry" and how they "aren't a real team." Tell us, Mets fans; what exactly does playing like a team mean? I'll tell you. It means a pitcher getting people out, and hitters stringing a couple baseknocks together. Then, after they score, they all smile and give each other high fives and Cleveland Steamers or something.

The problem is that people are assuming a causal relationship one way (chemistry-->winning) when the truth is the opposite (winning--->Cleveland Steamers). If the Mets reel off 7 in a row, or 15 of 20, we will be inundated with story after story about how the Mets are playing like a team - how they're all smiling in the dugout etc. The same thing happened with the Yankees a few years ago, when every day Joe Torre was forced to answer the inane question "Are you having fun, Joe?" I cut beat reporters a little slack; it's hard to file interesting stories on a given team 180 days a year that are separate from game results. But the next time some reporter asks Willie Randolph (or Joe Girardi, for that matter) "What's wrong with this team's chemistry, and how can you turn it around?" I hope the answer is but one word:

"Winning."